The Cleveland Bronze

In 1986, the Cleveland Museum purchased a spectacular Roman bronze statue from the Edward H. Merrin Gallery in New York for $1.85 million. However, the piece should never have been on the market. 

The Cleveland bronze came from a large group of artifacts known to have been taken from the ancient city of Bubon, in southwest Türkiye. In the 1960s, local villagers looted the site, which was rich with ancient bronze statues. Soon after, never-before-seen pieces hit the art market.

This particular statue was smuggled into Switzerland by the notorious art trafficker Robert Hecht, who sold it to the dealer Charles Lipson, along with three other bronzes. This quartet, showing up with no established provenance, caught the attention of scholars, including Jale Inan, a Turkish archaeologist who connected the bronzes to empty statue bases at Bubon. The attention made the pieces harder to sell, and this particular bronze circulated through several prominent institutions – the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Rutgers University. Lipson was finally able to sell the statue to the Cleveland Museum of Art through the Edward H. Merrin Gallery in 1986.

When the museum announced its acquisition in 1987, curator Arielle Kozloff did not attempt to hide the statue’s incriminating source, stating that the bronze came from ancient Bubon. She referred to the statue as “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius”, arguing that its identity could be assumed through the statue’s manner of dress and its imperial scale.

Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe, who has studied the Bubon bronzes, notes that the museum never acknowledged the empty statue base in Bubon inscribed with Marcus Aurelius’ name—the strongest piece of evidence connecting the piece to the emperor-philosopher.

In 2009, the Turkish government requested additional provenance information from the museum, and three years later claimed that it had been looted. The museum maintained the statue on display. However, in 2023, just before the Manhattan District Attorney’s office alleged the illegal acquisition of the statue, the Cleveland Museum of Art changed its story. They distanced the work from its Turkish origins, describing it as “Roman or possibly Greek Hellenistic” and removed its earlier identification as Marcus Aurelius.

In August 2023, the statue was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. The Cleveland Museum filed a lawsuit against the Manhattan DA to retain ownership of the statue, arguing that it had legally acquired the statue and claiming that the statue’s origin could not be definitively proven. However, a forensic investigation of soil samples and lead isotope analysis, as well as witness interviews, revealed that the statue was undoubtedly looted from Bubon.

Following the conclusion of the scientific testing, the Cleveland Museum of Art dropped its lawsuit and repatriated the bronze to Türkiye, removing the statue from display July 2025.