The Forged ‘Ancient’ Statues That Fooled the Met’s Art Experts for Decades
The fakes were on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 28 years.
BY NATALIE ZARRELLI
The curator who acquired them, John Marshal, wrote “I can find
nothing approaching it in importance,” in a report for the museum; these pieces
challenged known history of ancient Italian art. They were in amazing
condition.
There was just one problem: they were fakes. And for the 28
years they were on proud display, even skeptical experts couldn’t help the Met
evade one of the most embarrassing scandals of the art world.
Marshal and his colleagues at the museum acquired the statues
one-by-one from an artifact dealer named Pietro Stettiner between 1915 and
1921, believing that they were exquisite and unusual examples of Etruscan art
that was more influenced by ancient Greek statues than usual in size and
aesthetic—the shapes of the eyes, mouths, and general features. The statues
were convincing: weathered and cracked, the old warrior statue was missing a
finger and an arm; their striking black glazes seemed just like those of other
ancient works. While acquiring one of the warriors, Marshal’s college wrote
with glee about the artifact’s “wonderful preservation” and added that the
asking price was “quite fantastic.” It all seemed too good to be true—which,
unfortunately for the Met, it was.
According to the New York Times’ article on the forgeries in
February, 1962, the museum had been “uneasy for years” about the large
sculptures. The Etruscan culture influenced and invented much of what we think
of as Roman, and there were plenty of scholars studying the society’s art;
Italian historians in particular began voicing their concerns before the
sculptures were displayed. After Marshal’s death in 1928, more rumors
circulated about Stettiner’s supposed excavators of the pieces, who were linked
to other forgeries in Italy.
While the Met’s 1933 Bulletin insisted that the warriors had
been “compared with vigor” and they seemed to compare with other Etruscan works
from the fifth century, critics concluded that the sculptures seemed a bit out
of place; they were the wrong shape and size. The statues were amazingly
complete and well-preserved for their age, yet the old warrior was missing a
whole arm. The big warrior was weirdly proportioned, with one oddly long arm
and a stocky frame on classically formed legs. According to some experts, they
weren’t even particularly good examples of Etruscan artwork. More concerns
fluttered into the museum as its exhibit descriptions crept around Europe.
Over the years of the exhibit, the museum’s experts explained
this and other doubts away, possibly because of the pure high of new discovery
and an attitude in the Western art world that assumed superiority and beauty of
classical art. In 1921 art historian and authority Gisela Richter seemingly got
carried away in the museum’s Papers on the Etruscan warriors; the find agreed
with the exquisite descriptions of Etruscan art in historical writings. “Whom
did our warrior represent? Was he a god or a mortal?” she wondered. Richter
regretted that her colleagues didn’t know its original location, but believed
it might have represented a god—the edge of an altar base seemed to be
preserved. Other historians agreed, and examined the statues with wonder.
Weirdly, while the statues’ flaws evaded Richter and others,
museum staff examined the pieces closely enough to know specific details,
including that the large warrior was “built free hand from the bottom up.”
Richter’s paper had also explained that the statues were “Under Greek influence
but Italian in nature,” which became a popular deflecting argument in years to
come. This last bit, at least, was technically correct, but the Italians who
made it were much more modern than expected.
In Italy in the early 20th century, three brothers Riccardo,
Teodoro, and Virgilio Angelino Riccardi, and their colleague Alfredo Adolfo
Fioravanti were living an archeological forger’s dream: they had easy access to
actual artifacts, and both legitimate and corrupt antique dealers who wanted
repairs and copies made of their wares. According to George Kohn in The New
Encyclopedia of American Scandal, the forgers were long suspected to have made
unauthorized excavations in Italy by the government, but managed to avoid
actual prosecution. In their studio, the forgers sculpted the large warriors
and painted them black, broke them up to fire the sections in their small kiln,
and then sent the pieces to their artifact dealer covered with a smattering of
mud.
For decades, experts murmured back and forth about the
authenticity of the statues, but they lacked evidence to discredit them.
Finally, in 1960, ceramic archaeologist Joseph V. Noble of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art found a way to test the sculptures: by replicating the methods
that the ancient Etruscans used for pottery, he found they used a three stage
firing process to make the black glaze and ordered tests of the pottery’s
chemical makeup that revealed a black pigment containing manganese, which
Etruscans did not use. Noble and a colleague published the exposé, which
included tests, researched documents and letters as proof.
There were other red flags that could have been seen earlier on,
too. Authentic pieces should have had vent holes to let air circulate through
the large ceramic pieces if they had been made and fired whole, but small vent
holes were found in two of the statues; the old warrior, which had none, would
have exploded had it been made the correct way. In 1961, the surviving forger
of the group, Fioravanti, was finally persuaded by museum investigators to
appear before the U.S. consulate in Rome to confess the crime holding the left
thumb of the big warrior, which he’d kept as a souvenir, according to the New
York Times’ description of the events.
The big reveal of the sculptures’ inauthenticity paired with
their long-term display was about as scandalous as it could get for a highly
esteemed art institution. The forgers had copied the big warrior from a picture
of a small bronze Greek statue in a book from the Berlin Museum; the old
warrior from an Etruscan coffin at the British Museum, which Kohn writes also
turned out to be fake. Most embarrassing of all, the large warrior head was
modeled from a head found on a small Etruscan vase in the Met’s own collection.
The weird proportions of the big warrior were, it turned out, the result of a
short ceiling and small studio. The arm was missing from the large warrior
because, as Kohn writes, Fioravanti and the Riccardi brothers couldn’t agree on
which way to attach the original arm.
According to the Times in 1962, after the sculptures were outed
as fakes, they were locked up in a “morgue” in the basement with restricted
viewing for students and scholars, never to be fawned over again. But, for a
time, the clumsy art of some Italian potters made experts point in awe—leading
to the first time the Met would ever admit to forgeries in an esteemed
collection (though, thanks to Noble, not the last). While detecting forgeries
is tricky, one thing is certain: if the authenticity of a piece of art is
important to you, it pays to be careful.
Full Fathom Five
Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock’s earliest “drip” paintings. While its lacelike top layers consist of poured skeins of house paint, Pollock built up the underlayer using a brush and palette knife. A close look reveals an assortment of objects embedded in the surface, including cigarette butts, nails, thumbtacks, buttons, coins, and a key. Though many of these items are obscured by paint, they contribute to the work’s dense and encrusted appearance. The title, suggested by a neighbor, comes from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, in which the character Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes.”
How Mafia Money Helps Drive The Global Art Market
How Mafia Money Helps Drive The Global Art Market
"The global art market is
worth between 58 and 60 billion euros." -
Valuable pieces of art have a
special appeal to people in organized crime, both as trophies — conveying power
and prestige — and as a means to launder ill-gained earnings.
Maria Berlinguer
LA STAMPA
ROME — Gioacchino Campolo,
Italy's video poker king, loved art. Among the 300 million euros worth of goods
confiscated from him were about 100 very valuable works of art: paintings by
Salvador Dali, Giorgio Morandi, Renato Guttuso, Mattia Petri, and Giorgio de
Chirico.
Collections in the tens of
millions of euros were also confiscated from: Nicola Schiavone, son of Franceso
Schiavone, boss of the Casalesi clan within the Naples-based Camorra crime
syndicate; and from Gianfranco Becchina, art dealer to Matteo Messina Denaro,
boss of Sicily's Cosa Nostra.
Let's not, of course, forget the
two Van Gogh oil paintings — Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen
and View of the Sea at Scheveningen — which were stolen in 2002 from the Van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and later found by Italian financial crime unit
officers in Castellamare di Stabia, Naples, in a cottage linked to drug
trafficking kingpin Raffaele Imperiale.
And then there are the
'Ndrangheta investments in 17th-Century paintings in Lombardy, and the
collections of Gennaro Mokbel and Massimo Carminati, active figures on the
piazza of Rome, at the center of the must-see documentary Follow the Paintings
by Francesca Sironi, Alberto Gottardo and Paolo Fantauzzi.
Are criminals and mafia bosses
really this passionate about art? Hard to imagine. More likely it's a sign of
just how much the art market has become a phenomenal money laundering and
investment tool for organized crime. It's a sector that allows dirty money to
be hidden, safe and sound, with a guaranteed protection against devaluation
over time.
And this isn't just about
laundering. Artwork offers the certainty of an investment that won't have
inflationary repercussions, and with a guaranteed return to boot, provided the
money is invested in masterpieces destined to securely maintain their value
over time.
The global art market is worth
between 58 and 60 billion euros. It's a worldwide boom that doubled in size in
the last 10 years, and which shows no sign of imploding. And not just thanks to
those evergreen works, the masterpieces. It's also due to the exponential rise
in prices for works by skyrocketing young artists, pieces that can in some
cases top $100 million. All anomalies, according to experts in the sector.
In the past decade, galleries and
auction houses have beat record after record, succeeding in placing both
masterpieces and works by artists launched from semi-anonymity to worldwide
commercial success.
It's a sector that has benefited from an
absolute lack of regulation.
But not all that glitters is gold, because
passionate collectors aren't the only ones driving the market's wild expansion.
Also fueling the frenzy is the ease with which mob interests have so far been
able to use this commercial bubble to recycle illicit funds. We're talking
about a sector, in other words, that has benefited from an absolute lack of
regulation.
"It's a flow of cash coming
above all from the drug trade," explains Gen. Allesandro Barbera,
commander of Scico, the central investigative service on organized crime of the
Guardia di Finanza.
Roughly 18 billion euros (or 1%
of Italy's GDP) is the colossal value of real estate and goods confiscated by
the Italian financial authorities from criminals between 2015 and 2019.
Seizures that confirm the importance of what is seen as a strategic choice of
the mob to invest in safe-haven assets: principally diamonds, precious metals,
paintings and archeological finds.
These treasures aren't all
stolen. Many are acquired legally on the art market, above all at auction.
"The mafia enterprise moves
indiscriminately between the two words, legal and illegal, which makes it
particularly tricky," Barbera explains. "For the clans, safe-haven
assets like works of art are desirable because they are convenient. It's a business
with branches all over the world, very difficult to reconstruct. We find
ourselves constantly facing a two-faced Janus, and it requires ever more
sophisticated investigative techniques to find where the illicit funds are
hiding, and to map out all the money transfers."
Barbera adds: "When you find
yourself facing a mafia organization that moves in the legal art market, you
don't need sharpshooters so much as business-minded investigators who know how
to read financial statements."
Works of art and safe-haven
assets, he explains, are today's "cashier's checks: exchange goods with
stable value and a double advantage — masking the provenance of the
investments, and guaranteeing the availability of the good in real time on the
global market."
They are like trophies to exhibit as
demonstrations of power.
The criminal chain operates, furthermore, like
a value chain that, in its various phases, succeeds in raising and sustaining a
constant growth in value.
Investigators have also succeeded
in documenting a "reverb effect" enjoyed by the chief clans that own
artistic masterpieces with universally recognized value. The extremely coveted
items are trophies to exhibit as public demonstrations of power, prestige and
dominion over their territory.
"For a mafia boss, having a
painting or a sculpture by a major artist at his disposal is not just a
money-laundering scheme. Being able to exhibit a masterpiece confers prestige
and reputation," the general says. "It contributes to spreading the
idea of supremacy that a hegemonic group wants to express in a geographic area,
or an in a specific sector of illicit traffic."
Thus the possession of art
becomes a sign of power and socio-cultural investiture. A status symbol. It's a
well-oiled machine. Over the years, the clans have perfected the methods of
hiding money trails coming from drugs and various other rackets and trades.
"Organized crime, in its
different expressions, have an interest in investing in goods that can help
hide their net worth," says Federico Cafiero De Raho. "Works of art
with astronomical values are thus used as instruments to safely deposit huge
sums of wealth."
And with a specific advantage for
clans. "These investments in paintings, sculptures and archeological
treasures effectively cover up the economic entity concentrated in the
object," he adds.
A way, then, to muddy the waters,
to not give any certainty as to how much illegal money has been laundered along
the successive gears of the "artistic laundry machine." The price of
an artwork remains secret. To determine how valuable it is, one must turn to a
market that is based on subjective valuations.
The national anti-mafia
prosecutor reconstructs a constantly updated case study that points
unequivocally to a method of hidden payment via art. In hundreds of cases, in
fact, paintings, sculptures and frescoes guarantee money transfers from one
mafia group to another, protected from any risk.
With a piece of paper, with a
private agreement, an exchange of virtual currency is implemented and secured
between criminal organizations without a single masterpiece, and in some cases
even entire art galleries, needing to be transferred from one location to
another.
The artwork remains where it is
kept — perhaps in a free port or duty-free zone, inaccessible to all — and
passes from one buyer to another.
And this is one of the new
frontiers on which attention is being focused, by investigators and
legislators. Meanwhile, the fifth directive of the European Union on anti-money
laundering imposes on art sector operators the same regulations of transparency
currently applicable to banks, notaries and accountants.
Houses of Parliament
Houses of Parliament,
London, Claude Monet, 1900, Art Institute of Chicago: European Painting and
Sculpture. During his London campaigns, Claude Monet painted the Houses of
Parliament in the late afternoon and at sunset from a terrace at Saint Thomas’s
Hospital. This viewpoint was close to that of the English artist J. M. W.
Turner in his visionary paintings of the fire that had destroyed much of the
old Parliament complex in 1834. In his response to the poetry of dusk and mist,
however, Monet was actually inspired by the work of a more recent painter of
the Thames, the American James McNeill Whistler.
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