What is the reason?

Walk through any classical art museum in Europe and you’ll likely see severed noses, severed fingers, and multiple severed heads on ancient Roman sculptures. There’s a pattern, says Rachel Kusser, a professor of classics and art history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. While it’s often impossible to know exactly how a statue’s head went missing, scientists have collected some archaeological clues that suggest it wasn’t always an accident.

The first and most obvious reason is that The neck is the natural weak point of the human body.. Considering that most of these statues are around 2,000 years old, they have been through so much adversity and adversity in that time, it is perhaps even more surprising that at least some of the statues have retained their heads. They have survived the rise and fall of empires, wars, destruction, looting and pogroms, as well as countless transfers from one owner to another. If the statue fell, its weakest point would be its head.

The second reason is Romans sometimes deliberately smashed their own statuesIn a process called “damnatio memoriae”, the Roman Senate could vote to condemn the memory of a particularly unpopular emperor after his death. If the vote was in favor, the Senate would erase the emperor’s name from documents, confiscate his property, and deface his portraits and statues. The infamous emperor Nero was an example of this, and many of his portraits were damaged or reworked, according to Rachel Kusser.

In addition to Rome Sculptors sometimes intentionally created their sculptures with removable headsAccording to Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this design allowed for different materials to be used for the torso and face, for different sculptors to work on the same sculpture, and even for the head to be changed in the future. Such sculptures are easy to recognize because the torso has a hole through which the sculptor could fit his neck, and the head has a smoothly carved edge rather than a jagged break where the neck ends.

An example of a removable statue head is shown on the left and a severed head on the right / Public domain photo / Paul Getty Museum

Modernity

Nowadays, statues are rarely beheaded. Roman statues fetch big money on the antiques market, and sleazy art dealers have found they can make more money by selling two works instead of one. It is said that they They started to cut off the heads of the statues themselves.

The Draped Woman statue at the Paul Getty Museum is an example of this. When the museum acquired the 7-foot-tall statue in 1972, it was headless. However, archive photographs show that it had been in this form until at least the 1930s. The mystery was solved when the head was found for sale separately from another dealer. It turned out that someone had cut it in two in the 20th century.