A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds by Michael Farquhar

Author:Michael Farquhar [Farquhar, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0143035442
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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They Just Can’t Be Etruscted

Millions of visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were awed for half a century by two large warrior statues (and a huge warrior’s head) said to have come from the ancient Etruscan culture that preceded Roman rule in central Italy. The artifacts, discovered in pieces and carefully restored, were thought to be about twenty-five hundred years old. No one seemed to notice that they looked like props from a B-movie set, and so the “Etruscan” treasures remained on view until 1961.

It was then that a massive fraud was exposed. An art expert and cultural sleuth named Harold Woodbury Parsons tracked down an old man who was said to have forged Etruscan art earlier in the century. His name was Alfredo Fioravanti, and he shared with Parsons stories from his career in the bogus art trade. He and two brothers named Riccardi worked together for a firm that specialized in the repair of antique pottery. Soon enough, Fioravanti and the Riccardi brothers parlayed their skills into the manufacture of Etruscan vases and small statues. This proved so profitable that the three men got more ambitious and commenced work on their giant figures.

They fashioned the clumsy looking figures in clay and mixed in manganese dioxide (unknown in the sixth century BC) to simulate a type of old glaze called Greek black. There was one problem, however. Their kiln was too small to accommodate the large statues. The solution was to break the hardened clay and fire the pieces separately. The fragments were then sold to an acquiring agent for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complete with a fictitious provenance.

Armed with this information, Parson wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that the museum been displaying fake Etruscan statuary since early in the century. He offered simple proof if anyone doubted it. One of the statues was missing a thumb. When the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman art went to Italy with a cast of the hand, he was dismayed to find that the thumb Fioravanti had snapped off decades before fit perfectly. Not only that, it was also revealed that the fake statues had been modeled on an Etruscan figure from the British Museum that the forgers had seen in a photograph. It too was a fake.

“So on Valentine’s Day of 1961,” wrote Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “the world learned that the three Etruscans, so admired for so long, published hundreds of times, taught in schools as exemplars of the spirited and bellicose Etruscan civilization, were really prime examples of modern Italian sculpture of the 1910s and 1920s.”

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