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.