Why are so many Roman statues headless? New York professor has an explanation

You can often see Roman sculptures without heads in museums or private exhibitions. A professor explained that there are several reasons for this.

According to the scientist, ancient statues often lose their heads because the neck is a weak point that is subject to destruction. But it is also a well-known fact that Roman sculptors sometimes deliberately created their statues with heads that are removed, LiveScience writes.

At exhibitions, it is difficult to see a painting that is missing half of the canvas or a tapestry that is partially unraveled. But ancient Roman statues are often exhibited broken, without certain details, such as broken noses, lost limbs, or missing heads.

Why Roman statues are headless

Rachel Kousser, a professor of classics and art history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, said that the first and most common reason why so many statues are headless is that the neck is a weak point. So when a sculpture falls down after years of display, being carted around the world or passed from owner to owner, the neck is usually the first place to break.

However, according to the professor, the smashed heads are not always an accident, as sometimes Romans deliberately created their own statues without head. In a process called "damnatio memoriae," the Roman Senate could vote to condemn the memory of a particularly hated emperor after his death. After that, the ruler's name was erased from the archives, his property was confiscated, and his portraits and statues were destroyed. According to Rachel, one example of this was the infamous Emperor Nero as so many of his portraits have come down to us damaged.

It is also known that Roman sculptors sometimes deliberately created their statues with heads that could be removed when the monument was transported. According to Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this design not only facilitated the safe transportation of the finished product but also allowed the use of different materials for the body and head of the artwork and even different sculptors working on the same statue.

According to experts, such statues are highly recognizable because the bodies have a hole where the sculptor could insert the neck, and the head has a smoothly carved edge where the neck ends, rather than a sharp one from destruction.

Kenneth also said that in rare cases, the heads of statues are deliberately cut off nowadays. After all, Roman sculptures are very expensive on the antiquities market. Therefore, dishonest art dealers decapitate statues themselves to make more money because two artifacts are worth more than one.

The Statue of a Draped Woman from the Getty Museum is an example of such barbarism. In 1972, the museum acquired a headless sculpture. However, archival photographs showed that the monument was complete during the 1930s. Later, the museum's senior curator noticed that an antiquities dealer was selling a head that looked suspiciously like the one that had once been on a statue in his collection. It became clear that someone had separated the two parts in the twentieth century.

Despite the fact that the sloppy cutting off of the head by vandals complicated the reconstruction, experts were able to do it.

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