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Forgery, Art

An art forgery is an object that was intentionally produced to deceive a purchaser as to its date and authorship. This is distinct from the manufacture of copies without the intent of fraud, as well as the imitation of works by art masters by their pupils and later followers, and misattributed works.

History of Art Forgery

The forgery of works of art is as old as the market for collectors for such works. Accordingly, forgeries were produced even in antiquity. For instance, the ancient Roman writer Phaedrus mentioned in the prologue to his Aesop's Fables that sculptors would claim that works they produced were made by earlier famous artists, such as Praxiteles or Myron of Eleutherai, or that forged paintings were attributed to Zeuxis. Cypriot pottery, such as white slip milk bowls and bilbils, was a desired import during the Late Bronze Age in Palestine; although the remains of many actual imported vessels are regularly found in archaeological excavations, many locally produced imitations are also commonly found.

During the Renaissance, art historian Giorgio Vasari mentioned that artist Lorenzo Ghiberti made counterfeit Greek and Roman medals that appeared to be antiques. Vasari also reported on a marble Cupid, known as the Sleeping Eros, sculpted by Michelangelo Buonarotti who, after completing it, buried it in a vineyard to acquire a false antique look. Another Renaissance forgery was the painting by Luca Giordano of Christ Healing a Lame Man, which he passed off as a work of his more famous contemporary Albrecht Durer.

During the 18th century, soon after the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Giuseppe Guerra was producing forged Roman paintings for sale to collectors. Also in the 18th century, William Sykes, an English forger, sold fakes of works supposedly painted by Jan van Eyck and other well-known masters.

Art Museums and Forgery

Museums have often unknowingly purchased forgeries. The Louvre, for example, purchased the gold tiara of Saitapharnes, an inscribed headdress of solid gold that depicted scenes from the Iliad, and which was thought to date to the 3rd century b.c.e, until a forger from Odessa admitted early in the 20th century that he had made it. In 1935, the British Museum removed from exhibition what it had thought was an Etruscan sarcophagus from the 6th century b.c.e, The woman depicted on the sarcophagus was wearing undergarments typical of the 19th century c.e, and the male figure next to her was nude, unlike any other known examples from that period.

Between 1915 and 1921, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City purchased three purported large Etruscan terra-cotta warriors that were, in fact, created by Alfonso and Pio Riccardi and three of their six sons, with the assistance of Italian sculptor Alfredo Fioravanti, who in 1961 admitted how they had been made. After his admission, the museum finally announced that the statues were forgeries, which had been suggested by earlier chemical tests of the glazes, as well as by the extraordinarily even firing characteristics, which would have been very difficult for the ancient Etruscans to have achieved.

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