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 Forged 'Ancient' Statues That Fooled the Met's Art Experts for Decades

 IN 1933 AT THE ETROPOLITAN Museum of Art in New York, three Etruscan warrior sculptures of black terracotta clay towered over their audience in an all-new exhibit. The ancient art, believed to be from the fifth century B.C., had never been displayed before: two warriors stood eight and six feet high, and a four-foot tall head stared into the audience from under its war helmet and big, curly beard.

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.

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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.