[Rarebooks] fs: An Ancient-Modern Scholarly "Ooopsie..."

[Joslin Hall Rare Books]

Richter, Gisela M.A. "ETRUSCAN TERRACOTTA WARRIORS IN THE METROPOLITAN 
MUSEUM OF ART. With a Report on the Structure and Technique by Charles F. 
Binns".

New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art. Papers No.6. 1937. Edition limited to 
500 copies.  Card covers. 9.5"x12.5", 28 pages plus 24 b/w illustrations; 
light soil; a nice copy. [06801] $175.00

This is the story of a gigantic (so to speak) scholarly "oopsie".

In late 1915 Gisela Richter, renowned expert on Greek and Roman antiquities 
at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, received a letter from John 
Marshall, the Museum's veteran purchasing agent in Italy, describing a 
newly discovered life-size Etruscan warrior figure in terra-cotta which had 
been discovered in an Italian field. The "old warrior" (he had a white 
beard and was emaciated, somewhat like, as one observer commented later, a 
Giacommetti sculpture) was soon followed by a massive four-foot tall terra 
cotta warrior's head, and there was even talk of a greater treasure waiting 
to be found...

It was, of course, all fakery, carried out on a grand, almost "mythic" 
scale, a scale meant to make experts put aside all their nagging doubts and 
see the "Etruscans" as what they were not (namely, ancient). The 
white-bearded warrior and the massive head had been created by Riccardo 
Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti, two young men of skill and a certain 
vision. Riccardo's father and brothers had also specialized in historic 
pottery, but Riccardo was the true genius of the family. With his friend 
Alfredo he first created the anorexic, white-bearded warrior. The figure 
was modeled as one piece and then broken up into 24 fragments for firing, 
as the kiln was not large enough to accomodate the entire figure. The 
warrior is missing his right arm for the simple reason that the two forgers 
could not agree on how to position the arm, so they compromised by breaking 
it off and discarding it.

After selling the figure to the Metropolitan, the pair began work on 
another figure, this time a gigantic warrior's head. Working from a 
description by Pliny of a 25-foot tall statue of Jupiter in a Roman temple, 
the pair made the head four and a half feet tall. This was broken into 178 
pieces, fired, and shipped off to the Met. And then Riccardo and Alfredo 
had to leave to serve their time in the Italian Army.
	
When they returned they began their most audacious project yet- a Colossal 
Warrior in terra cotta, standing over eight feet tall. Then tragedy struck. 
Riccardo was killed in a fall from his horse that winter, and his place was 
taken by two less-skilled cousins. As with the earlier pieces, the statue 
had to be fired in pieces as it was much too large for the kiln.

It proved, in fact, to even be too large for the room it was being modeled 
in, and by the time they had modeled up as far as the waist it was obvious 
that the elegant classical proportions of genuine Etruscan sculpture would 
have to be ignored -there simply was not enough room for the upper body 
without going through the ceiling. The odd result- classical legs and a 
stocky, disproportionate torso, troubled some scholars.

In 1921 the Met. purchased the warrior for an undisclosed price said to 
have approached 5 million dollars in today's money. The statue was 
reconstructed from the fragments by the Met's experts with one odd 
exception- the genitals, which had been carefully modeled (the warrior, 
like many Etruscan statues, was partially nude from the waist down) were 
left off and apparently kept in storage. It may have been just as well. One 
story that came to light later related that while the body of the figure 
was based upon that of Riccardo's cousin and helper Teodoro, the "privates" 
were modeled after Riccardo's own, and had been recognized by a number of 
young Italian ladies of his hometown...

Attempts to erase doubts that were already being whispered in art circles 
in Europe, as well as the hope that the "secret" field they had been found 
in might be divulged by their "discoverers", delayed the publication of a 
scholarly monograph on the three figures until 1937. For Richter, bringing 
them to the Met. and publishing them represented one of the crowning 
achievements of her distinguished career, and it was undoubtedly this fact 
that blinded her to what was becoming all too obvious to other scholars who 
were not emotionally or professionally attached to the warriors.

The talk about their true origins swirled quietly for the next decade or 
two, but after a visiting Italian scholar was offered a chance to see all 
three statues in 1959, and commented that he did not need to see them since 
he knew the man who had made them, authorities at the museum decided 
something had to be done. In 1960 a series of tests concluded that the 
glazes on all three specimens contained chemicals which had not been in use 
before the 17th century, and in 1961 Fioravanti signed a confession of the 
whole affair, and supplied a missing thumb which fit perfectly.

At that point several other "bothersome" points that had been noted over 
the years began to make more sense- the Colossal Warrior, for instance, 
could not even support its own weight, and when compared to real Etruscan 
statuary, simply looks crude and even modern. Today the statues are stored 
far away from prying eyes, but they still provide an entertaining and 
sobering lesson in fake busting.

A much more detailed account of the warriors was written by David Sox in 
his excellent book "Unmasking the Forger, The Dossena Deception" (1987), 
from which most of the material for this essay was taken; Thomas Hoving, 
the former Director of the Met., also deals with the story, and speculates 
on the role of John Marshall, in his book "False Impressions: The Hunt for 
Big-Time Art Fakes" (1996).

Pictures->
<http://www.joslinhall.com/etruscan_terracotta.htm>


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