Jale Inan, a Turkish archaeologist, saw the 1979 display in Denmark and concluded head and torso were a match. She later published a photo of the statue, head attached, from that exhibit as evidence. She acknowledged that the way the head had been affixed seemed off, but described it as an aberration that had to do with the fact that, among other things, the head had been oriented to face forward, rather than partly in profile as intended.

She determined, she wrote in a 1993 paper, that the intact statue had been part of a group of bronzes set up as a shrine to the imperial cult in Bubon, an archaeological site in southwest Turkey, when the region was a distant part of the Roman Empire.

She said local farmers had acknowledged to her that they found the bronzes in the 1960s and brought them to market, which violated Turkey’s cultural property law. Investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which seized the torso from the Met, said they also had interviewed local farmers in Turkey who confirmed the looting. The owner of the torso, who had lent it to the Met in 2011, did not fight the return.

In the 12 years it held it, the Met never subscribed to the theory that the torso was that of Severus. The museum called the figure simply a “Bronze statue of a nude male figure” and said in a wall label that it “may depict a god, a hero, a Hellenistic ruler, or a Roman emperor.”

In a statement, the Met went further, asserting it had contacted a bronze scholar years ago who said the Danish head did not seem to be a match, and that museum officials in Copenhagen also had their doubts.

The Danish museum and a Danish government website continue to post information online that links the Glyptotek’s head to the torso now in Turkey. Frederiksen, the head of collections, said that information will be updated when the museum’s review is completed, but, at this point, he said this evidence is no longer viewed as persuasive.