antiquities and ethnographica

This page considers forgery relating to antiquities and ethnographica.

     introduction

Forgery has been intimately associated with the discovery, marketing and critical reception of antiquities since at least the Han dynasty in China and late Republican Rome.

The provenance of works is often unclear, demand for works may be high but(without the forger's help not readily satisfied, and assessments of authenticity reflect changing conventions in collecting, modes of art criticism and prevailing consumer tastes. Forgery of ceramics, sculptures, paintings, textiles and other artifacts has accordingly encompassed production of a new work that is then passed off as being of a particular period, piecing together of authentic fragments to simulate antiquity or 'improvement' of existing works.

High profile exposures include the Louvre's Tiara of Saitapharnes (supposedly 3rd Century BC Scythian but probably Russian from the turn of last century), the Getty Kouros, Etruscan terracottas in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vinland Map at Harvard.

Oscar Muscarella's The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (Groningen: Styx 2000) suggests that around 40 per cent of archaeological objects tested by the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory prove to be fakes. It's claimed that half the antiquities brought for sale at Sotheby’s in a year are fake and that around 25,000 forged antiquities enter the market each year. Supposedly around 80% of 'ancient' terracottas smuggled from Mali since the 1980s have been fakes.

US academic John Moffitt has suggested in The Lady of Elche (Miami: University Presses of Florida 1995) that Spain's Lady of Elche sculpture dates from 1896 rather than 500 BC.

Scientific forgeries include the Piltdown Man, allegedly involving noosphere guru Teilhard de Chardin, for which see Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1990) by Frank Spencer.

     studies

An introduction to the manufacture and enthronement of antiquities is provided by Thomas Hoving's breezy False Impressions – The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996) and King of the Confessors (New York: Simon & Schuster 1981).

Hoving's activities as a curator/entrepreneur are criticised in John McPhee's acute A Roomful of Hovings (New York: Noonday Press 1985) and Muscarella's The Lie Became Great. Karl Meyer's The Plundered Past and Frank Arnau's The Art of The Faker ­ 3,000 Years of Deception (Boston: Little Brown 1959) are dated but still of value, as is Why Fakes Matter: Essays on problems of authenticity (London: British Museum Press 1992) edited by Mark Jones.

     other

For the Vinland Map see The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1995) by R.A. Skelton, Thomas Marston & George Painter, the 1998 Vinland Reread review by Paul Saenger and the revisionist account Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map by Kirsten Seaver

A perspective is provided by Shelly Errington's The Death of Authentic Primitive Art & Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1998) questioning some aspects of authenticity and primitivism.




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