If you’ve ever pondered this question, you might have assumed that the widespread absence of noses on ancient statues is primarily due to the passage of time. In many cases, that’s likely true. “The statues we see today in museums are almost always battered, worn, and damaged by time and the elements,” confirmed Spencer McDaniel, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University.
“Protruding parts of sculptures, like noses, hands, and heads, are almost always the first to break off. Other parts that are more securely attached, such as legs and torsos, are more likely to remain intact,” the researcher noted.
This is hard to dispute. Noses are relatively “delicate,” positioned high off the ground, making them easy to break when they fall. However, scientists believe there are other explanations as well.
So, where did the noses go?
“Most noses became intentional targets,” asserts Mark Bradley, a professor of classical literature at the University of Nottingham. According to him, the nose on the black basalt head of Tiberius’s nephew, Germanicus, was clearly chopped off by someone (the statue is housed in the British Museum). This likely occurred when early Christians carved a cross into the forehead of this pagan idol.
A similar fate likely befell the statue of Aphrodite from the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The goddess is missing her nose, and a large cross is carved into her forehead, ILFScience reported. Clearly, the removal of noses was part of a ritualistic overthrow of a foreign deity.
But why noses specifically?
In early civilizations, such as Ancient Egypt, it was believed that a statue contained the soul of the being it depicted. Therefore, when a statue was destroyed, it symbolically stripped that being of its power. When noses were severed from statues, it was equated with the destruction of the spirit of gods or people, as they were theoretically deprived of the ability to breathe.
However, some of these noseless ancient statues were created long after the era of Ancient Egypt. So what accounts for their mutilation?
A fashionable punishment in the ancient world
The key to understanding this, according to Professor Bradley, lies in the ancient Roman and Greek systems of justice, particularly in the forms of actual punishment inflicted on the condemned.
“This senseless destruction of ancient idols hints at traditions of inflicting mutilation on individuals, observed throughout the ancient world, in Homeric Greece, the Persian Empire, classical and Hellenistic Greece, and the Roman Empire up to the Byzantine period,” the scholar noted.
In both the ancient world and later, during the Byzantine Empire, the removal of noses was a fairly common punishment. “In Egypt, there was even a settlement called Rhinocolura (‘city of purchased noses’), where exiled criminals who had their noses cut off were sent,” Professor Bradley explained.
Thus, the severing of noses from statues served as a symbolic punishment for the figure they represented.
What about severed heads?
The above also applies to headless statues, of which there are likely more around the world than those with heads. Of course, some statues lost their heads accidentally, such as through falls. However, many decapitations were intentional: they aimed to undermine the authority of the figure depicted by the statue.
Rachel Kousser, a professor of ancient art at the City University of New York, believes, “The head is powerful. Decapitation was seen as a particularly effective way to harm the authority of a ruler or deity.”
Jean-François Manicom, an expert on the history of slavery at the Liverpool Museum, knows of many contemporary instances where statues have been involved in settling scores with past political figures. In Bristol, for example, a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was thrown into the harbor. In the U.S., several statues of Christopher Columbus have been decapitated.
According to the scholar, “symbolic lynchings seem still necessary for the transition from one era to another.”