When displaying a work of art, museums usually try to display it in its entirety. It’s rare to see a painting with half its canvas missing or a tapestry half torn apart. But with ancient Roman statues, missing bits were almost commonplace. Statues had broken noses, severed fingers, and, most notably, many were missing heads. While scientists often can’t say for sure how a statue lost its head, clues have led them to some common causes.

Ancient causes

The first and simplest reason why so many statues lose their heads is that the neck is a natural weak point in the human body, according to Rachel Kousser, a professor of classics and art history at the City University of New York. When a statue falls during display or transportation, the neck is often the first place to break.

But broken heads weren’t always an accident. Sometimes, Romans deliberately destroyed them. During the “damnatio memoriae” process, the Roman Senate could vote to destroy the seal of a hated emperor after his death. If approved, the Senate would erase the emperor’s name from the records, confiscate his property, and destroy his portraits and statues. The notorious emperor Nero is a prime example, according to Kousser, and many of his portraits were destroyed.

Additionally, Roman sculptors sometimes intentionally designed statues with removable heads. This design allowed them to use different materials for the body and face, allowing multiple sculptors to work on the same statue, or even replace the head in the future, according to Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. These statues are recognizable because the body has a hole for the sculptor to insert the neck, and the head also has a smooth, carved edge instead of a jagged one.

Modern causes

In rare cases, heads have been removed in modern times, Lapatin said. Roman statues were highly prized on the antiquities market, and unscrupulous art dealers realized they could make more money by selling two artifacts instead of one. So they took the heads off themselves.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s “Woman in a Robe” is an example. When the museum acquired the 7-foot-tall statue in 1972, it was only a torso. However, archival images show that it still had a head until at least the 1930s. When a senior museum curator discovered that an antiquities dealer was selling a head that looked like part of the statue, experts understood that someone had taken it apart in the 20th century.

“We don’t know the details, but it seems that whoever did it thought they could make a better deal by selling the headless statue and then selling the head,” Lapatin said. Although the sloppy drilling of the neck made it difficult to reattach the head to the body, the conservators were eventually able to complete the job, creating a rare “reunion” between the ancient statue and its head.