Sometimes You Find Artifacts, Sometimes You Make Your Own – The Story of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors (ca. 8th C BC… but actually 1915 AD)
For a few years between 1915 and 1921, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was thrilled to have acquired three statues created by the Etruscan civilization in Italy, which flourished between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC. Unfortunately, what the Museum didn’t know at the time was… they were forking over thousands of dollars for fakes.
The perpetrators of the scheme were two young men by the names of Riccardo Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti, who were rather skilled in the visual arts. As it turns out, Riccardo’s father and brothers were pottery “specialists” – read: forgers – but Riccardo was the most skilled out of his family. Along with his friend Alfredo, he decided that he’d like to make himself a little extra cash.
The first Etruscan warrior statue was modeled as a large, one-piece figure, but since the kiln wasn’t large enough to fit the whole thing, it was broken up into 24 pieces for firing and then rebuilt. The right arm of the warrior is missing, because the forgers couldn’t agree on how it should be positioned – and in order to avoid more arguments and potentially getting it wrong, thereby resulting in the Museum’s discovery of forgery – they simply broke off the arm and threw it away before presenting the piece to the Met.
After the successful sale of the ‘ancient’ figure to the museum, the pair began to work on another piece: a giant warrior’s head. Using a description by the ancient writer Pliny, who had once described a 25-foot tall statue of the god Jupiter from an ancient Roman temple, the head was created to stand four and a half feet high. Naturally, this was broken into pieces as well – 178 this time – then fired, and shipped away to the museum.
The pair was thrilled at their success! They’d expected things to go over well, but the Museum didn’t suspect a thing. Experts had been brought in to study the ‘ancient’ pieces and reports had been published on their meaning and place in the Etruscan culture… so the two men decided to embark on their most ambitious project thus far: the Colossal Terracotta Warrior. As they worked, the warrior took on a height of eight feet tall… but unfortunately, Riccardo was killed when he fell from his horse before the project was complete.
To replace him, Alfredo called upon two of Riccardo’s cousins, who weren’t nearly as skilled as he was. As they worked, the team became aware of a severe problem – the statue was going to be too large for the room they were creating it in! By the time they’d reached the waist, they realized that the well-known classical proportions of Etruscan sculpture was going to have to be ignored, since there was simply no space in the room to create a proper upper body – they’d have to open a hole in the ceiling to do that! The end result was a statue with perfectly proportioned legs… and a stocky, squat torso.
The Metropolitan Museum purchased the statue for an amount that is rumored to be the equivalent of around five million dollars today, and although the odd proportions were found troublesome by some scholars, the piece was still put on display. Still, rumors began to circulate as the art community tried to reconcile this piece with traditional Etruscan statues. Talk about the statues’ origins continued quietly for several decades, but the Museum refused to admit that anything had been amiss – after all, for the curator who’d acquired them, these pieces had been the distinguishing moment of her career.
In 1959, an Italian scholar visited the Museum and was offered a tour through to see the Etruscan statues – but oddly enough, he mentioned that he didn’t need to see them since he already knew the man who had created them! Finally, the Museum admitted that something might be wrong. In 1960, a number of tests were conducted on the statues’ glazes – and it was revealed that the pieces contained chemicals that had not been used before the 17th century.
In 1961, Alfredo Fioravanti confessed to creating all three statues, signed a written version of the confession, and presented one of the statues’ missing thumbs to prove it. The scandal of the Etruscan terracotta warriors was valuable in at least one respect: it revealed how much damage can be done when Museums become too eager to acquire pretty objects rather than truly inquire into their historical value.
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Tomorrow: Ancient Bulgaria’s Pliska
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