When a museum displays a piece of art, they usually try to show it in its entirety. It’s rare to see a painting with half its canvas missing, or a tapestry with one side unraveled. But when it comes to ancient Roman statues, they can come a little broken, and that’s pretty much the norm. Walk through any classical art museum, and you’re likely to see broken noses, severed fingers, and a whole lot of severed heads.
But why are so many Roman statues headless? Answering that question requires some “archaeological CSI” work, according to Rachel Kousser, a professor of classics and art history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York.
“You’re trying to look at the context of the sculpture; you’re trying to look at the break itself,” she explained. “You’re thinking about patterns you’ve seen in other sculptures.” While it’s often impossible to know exactly how a statue lost its head, these kinds of clues have led archaeologists to a few common causes.
The first and most common reason why so many statues are decapitated is that the neck is a natural weak point on the human body. When a statue falls over after years of being displayed, transported around the world, or passed from one owner to another, the neck is usually the first place to break.
But broken heads aren’t always an accident; sometimes Romans deliberately smashed their own statues. In 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 passed, the Senate would erase the emperor’s name from the records, confiscate his property, and deface his portraits and statues. The infamous Emperor Nero was one example of this, according to Kousser, and many of his portraits were damaged or altered.
Moreover, Roman sculptors sometimes deliberately designed their statues with removable heads that would “pop out” of the neck. According to Kenneth Lapatine, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this design allowed for different materials to be used for the body and face, for different sculptors to work on the same statue, or even for the statue’s head to be completely replaced in the future.
An example of a statue’s removable head (left) and broken head (right). Public domain, Getty
These statues are easily recognizable because the bodies have a hole where the sculptor could insert the neck, and the head has a smooth carved edge where the neck ends, rather than a jagged break.
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In rare cases, statues’ heads have been removed in modern times, Lapatin said. Roman sculptures fetch big money on the antiquities market, and wily art dealers realized they could make more money selling two artifacts instead of one, so they decapitated the statues themselves.
The Getty Museum’s Draped Woman statue is one example. By the time the museum acquired the 7-foot-tall (2.1-meter) statue in 1972, only the body remained, but archival photographs show that the woman’s sculpture had a head until at least the 1930s.
The head of a statue of a draped woman has been reunited with her body after it was severed in the 20th century, likely by an unscrupulous art dealer. Public domain, Getty
When a senior museum curator noticed an antiques dealer selling a head that looked suspiciously like the head of a broken statue in his collection, it became clear that someone had separated the two sometime in the 20th century.
Although the careless ‘chopping’ and ‘drilling’ on the neck made it difficult to reattach the head and body, restorers eventually managed to reconnect the parts, resulting in a rare reunion of the ancient statue and its head.
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