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Fake Ancient Etruscan Terra-Cotta Warriors -1937 Study
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Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a Report on the Structure and Technique by Charles F. Binns"
By Gisela Richter, M.A. Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Papers No.6. 1937. Edition limited to 500 copies. Card covers. 9.5âex12.5âe, 18 pages plus 24 black& white illustrations. A little light soil, but overall in very nice, clean, unworn condition.First let's talk about what this appears to be- a perfectly straightforward, scholarly report on several ancient Etruscan terra-cotta warriors which had been excavated in Italy several decades previously. The warriors were stars in the Met.'s Ancient Art galleries, and this monograph was written by the Met.'s leading expert on ancient arts.However, behind all that lurks a far stranger, more interesting tale...The tale not told in this scholarly paper is the story of a gigantic (to say the least) scholarly âeoeoopsieâe. It had all started in late 1915 when Gisela Richter, renowned expert on Greek and Roman antiquities at New Yorkâe(tm)s Metropolitan Museum of Art, received a letter from John Marshall, the Museumâe(tm)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 âeoeold warriorâe (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 warriorâe(tm)s head, and t was even talk of a greater treasure waiting to be found... <- The massive warrior's head It was, of course, all fakery, carried out on a grand, almost âeoemythicâe scale, a scale meant to make experts put aside all their nagging doubts and see the âeoeEtruscansâe 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. Riccardoâe(tm)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. The oddly emaciated "White-bearded Warrior" ->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 -t 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 todayâe(tm)s money. The statue was reconstructed from the fragments by the Met's experts with one odd exception- the genitals, which had...
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