Boston Museum Returns Bust to Turkey

By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR.

After two decades of negotiations, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has returned the broken-off bust of a famous statue of Herakles to Turkey, where it will be reunited with its lower half, the museum announced.

Turkey has long maintained that the top of this second-century A.D. statue, known as “Weary Herakles,” was stolen from an archaeological site in the Mediterranean and smuggled into the United States. The legs and lower body of the work are on display at the Antalya Museum in southwestern Turkey.

“The ‘Weary Herakles’ is a great work of art and we believe it should be back in Turkey where it can be made whole once again,” the director of the museum, Malcolm Rogers, said.

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told reporters that he carried the bust of the statue back on his plane on Sunday night after the Boston museum agreed to release it as “a goodwill gesture.”

The bust was handed over to Turkish cultural authorities late on Thursday after the museum signed an agreement with the Turkish government. Under the agreement, the Turks dropped claims that the museum engaged in wrongdoing when it obtained the statue from a German dealer in 1981.

It was not until 1990, when the bust was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that a scholar noticed that it seemed to be part of the same broken work on display in Turkey. The Turkish government claimed ownership and tests done in 1992 showed that the two pieces fit together.

Subsequent negotiations dragged on for years without a resolution, in part because the museum only owned a half-interest in the piece. In 2004, the museum acquired full ownership from the collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White, and restarted talks with the Turks.

The piece is a Roman statue in marble from the Hadrianic or Antonine period, and appears to be a copy of a famous bronze made in the third century B.C. by the Greek master Lysippos of Sikyon. It depicts Herakles leaning on his club in a fatigued pose.

via Boston Museum Returns Bust to Turkey – NYTimes.com.