
The Forged ‘Ancient’ Statues That Fooled the Met’s Art Experts for Decades - prismatic
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/etruscan-forgeries-met-museum-art
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sillypog
This reminds me of one of the very best pieces of television I ever saw: BBC's
Horizon documentary about The Mystery of the Persian Mummy:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/persianmummy.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/persianmummy.shtml)

The first half is breathless excitement on the part of historians who believe
they've found an artifact that changes their understanding of an ancient
culture, then it suddenly pivots into a murder investigation. Gripping stuff.

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bane
There's an interesting small exhibit in the Frick Fine Arts Building at the
University of Pittsburgh. In it, there are several copies of Italian
masterpieces. The artist, Nicholas Lochoff, was commissioned by the Russian
government in 1911, to go to Italy and produce near perfect replicas of the
art to be sent back to Russia for display and viewing. According to the
histories, he worked so meticulously that only a handful of the copies were
sent back by the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. He was then unable to
return to his home country and cut off from financial support, he started to
sell off these paintings, almost the entire collection of which is now in that
building.

In the same area, there are two completely original statues made in the style
of 14th century Italian marbles. They aren't copies at all, but were made in
the early 20th century by Alceo Dossena. Dossena sold his works through an art
dealer who unscrupulously sold them off as original 14th century works, some
of which ended up in museums. When Dossena found out about this, and
discovered the vast sums they were sold for (compared to what he earned) he
publicly revealed the situation and sued his dealer.

Here's a picture of some of the area in the building including the statues
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Frick_Fi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Frick_Fine_Arts_Building_-
_Pitt_-) _IMG_0767.jpg

What I found really fascinating is how this one exhibit really challenged
ideas of authenticity in art, what was a legitimate copy, what was
illegitimate, what was passed off as original and so on.

~~~
dagw
_In it, there are several copies of Italian masterpieces._

I've often wondered why museums and universities don't do this more often.
Make up a list of the 50-100 most important works of art in the western canon,
make really great copies of all of them and distribute them to museums around
the world so that more people can actually experience these works for
themselves. The only option today is to either look at tiny photos of the
works (which is a terrible way to study and appreciate art) or to spend a
massive amount of time and money traveling the world (which is totally
unrealistic for most people).

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mdlincoln
A related aside: while forgeries - deliberate imitations to mislead and
deceive - are exciting, they only represent a very tiny portion of art
attribution questions. In reality, these tend to deal more with discerning
between artists working in the same period, rather than those attempting to
fool the eye at several centuries' remove.

For example, the Rembrandt Research Project infamously set out to identify
genuine vs. fake Rembrandt paintings in his corpus of known works under the
false assumption that there would be a lot of 18th/19th/20th century
forgeries. In fact, most of the "non-Rembrandt" cases they found were not
later imitations, but instead works done by his own students or contemporaries
- or works co-produced by Rembrandt and another. The result - deconstructing
the project's original false assumption - proved revolutionary for our
understanding of artistic studio practice from the period, but failed to
locate many "forgeries" as such.

A review (paywalled, sorry!):
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/02604779899...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260477989900228)

And a Met exhibition:
[http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Rembrandt_Not_R...](http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Rembrandt_Not_Rembrandt_in_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_Aspects_of_Connoisseurship_Volumes_I_and_II)

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forgotpwtomain
Anecdotal: I had a literature professor that would relate the time he was at
the Louvre and a crazy guy pulled out a knife and dashed for the Mona Lisa
(this is before it was behind glass) - they were able to grab the man before
he damaged the painting. Since then he ceased to believe in the authenticity
of the art in musuems.

~~~
jacquesm
I've been peripherally involved in the restauration of a Mondriaan after it
was damaged by some knife wielding idiot and I can guarantee you that the art
is real.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
>I've been peripherally involved in the restauration of a Mondriaan after it
was damaged by some knife wielding idiot and I can guarantee you that the art
is real.

After which the display was permanently replaced by a copy? ;)

More seriously, though I don't say I believe it, surely it is an interesting
point. For example when I visited the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, there were
maybe a dozen other visitors total, one musuem worker per ~ 4 halls, and
nothing was under glass.

How sure are you of your ability to distinguish the original from an expert
fake? The Met's experts apparently couldn't for decades. I'd wager the number
of people in the world that can tell a real Carvaggio from an expert forgery
number in the double digits.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm sure that's true. But considering there are 100's of employees in your
average museum and such a conspiracy would require just about all of them to
be in on it I don't see how it could be kept a secret.

There are fakes in museums, but those are actual fakes where the museum isn't
in the know either. Estimates run as high as 20(!)%.

But a museum that would have an exact duplicate of the art on display for the
majority of their art would be incapable of keeping that a secret and likely
would not be looked at favorably.

FWIW I was good friends with the ex-curator of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
and have visited their vaults, and have been behind the scenes in the Tate
Gallery in London. The only thing I've been able to establish with any
certainty is that at least those two museums have far more art than they could
ever display and that I'd hate to see their insurance bills.

I did not come across an army of master forgers working hard to make new old
works or copies of works which I knew were on display.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm sure that's true. But considering there are 100's of employees in your
> average museum and such a conspiracy would require just about all of them to
> be in on it I don't see how it could be kept a secret._

Actually such a "conspiracy" wouldn't require more than a few to be on it. Why
would the guys guarding the spaces, or the people selling tickets and
merchandise, the cleaning staff, the canteen workers, the secretaries, etc
need to be "on it"? Those are the majority of the "100s" of workers.

Just the director, a few of the people in the administration, the curators,
and the ones putting up the paintings (or, actually, not even them).

~~~
jacquesm
And the insurers, the people that move the real paintings around, the people
that store the real ones and so on.

It's about as likely as a faked moonlanding. But then again, those too have
their believers.

~~~
coldtea
> _And the insurers, the people that move the real paintings around, the
> people that store the real ones and so on._

So, like 10 people? And even if it was 20 or 100 what's the great rush to
expose this? It's just something you don't talk about. It's not even that
interesting.

We have crews of 1000s of people not leaking tv series and film plots.

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empath75
Orson Welles's last movie was a pseudo documentary on forgery:

[https://youtu.be/gIVgUjj6RxU](https://youtu.be/gIVgUjj6RxU)

