CHAPTER 29
Tyrrhenian Sirens
The Seductive Song of Etruscan Forgeries

Richard Daniel De Puma

1. Introduction

Forgeries of various sorts have been with us for millennia, and show no sign of disappearing. This chapter treats specific types produced primarily, or at least most famously, during a specific period of time, 1860–1920, which were, almost certainly, the products of Italian artisans.

Etruscan art appeals to forgers because it is relatively unfamiliar when compared to Greek, Roman, or even Egyptian art. There are now, and there certainly were earlier, far fewer experts and connoisseurs concerned with Etruscan art than with the art of other ancient Mediterranean cultures. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the few scholars who were acquainted with Etruscan art worked primarily with Greek and Roman art. For them, the Etruscans were an interesting phenomenon but, due to the lack of a large corpus of original literary material, their visual and material culture remained peripheral and poorly understood. It is also true that, outside of Italy, relatively little Etruscan art was on public display or even available for study during this period. Major discoveries of well-preserved, properly excavated Etruscan materials were just coming to light, and many of them were still not restored or easily accessible.

Therefore, it was possible for forgers to create objects that, to us today, might appear ridiculously odd and unlikely, but which nevertheless fooled the experts of earlier times. By the nineteenth century archaeologists were already beginning to appreciate the highly diversified and eclectic nature of Etruscan art. These qualities, of course, made it much easier for forgers to deceive vulnerable collectors and museum curators. Furthermore, forgers could exploit the natural resources (e.g., local clays and stones like alabaster or tufa) used by the Etruscans. Finally, there was a steady supply of original but damaged or incomplete Etruscan artifacts being recovered. With some ingenuity, these authentic works could be enhanced or “restored” into appealing – but phony – pastiches.

The earliest well-documented forger of Etruscan antiquities is a Dominican priest named Giovanni Nanni, better known as Annius of Viterbo (1432 or 1437–1502). Annius was an ambitious scholar, well-versed in Latin, who examined several authentic works of Etruscan art accidentally discovered in late fifteenth-century Italy. These objects were often terracotta or stone cinerary urns and, as is usually the case, they were inscribed or painted with the name of the deceased. After collecting and studying these urns, Annius eventually claimed that he could decipher the Etruscan language. He demonstrated his skill by creating several lengthy inscriptions that combined authentic Etruscan letters and words with Greek letters and fanciful Egyptian “hieroglyphs.” He buried these new inscriptions, along with some fake sculptures, and in 1492 “excavated” them before an astonished audience that included Pope Alexander VI. Everyone was impressed when Annius began a seemingly impromptu translation of these obscure, fragmentary inscriptions. Before long, Annius had developed an elaborate theory that showed, according to his careful decipherment of several wholly-invented lengthy inscriptions and documents, that Viterbo had been the capital of a primordial Italy and that Noah, not Saint Peter, had been the first pope and ruled over the Etruscans!

Although some astute scholars doubted Annius’s claims, his fanciful history was accepted by many authorities at the time. Annius’s true deception was not discovered until many years after his death. The priest’s forgeries were made not for financial gain but to increase his reputation and position at the papal court. He also became a popular lecturer. On a more positive note, Annius’s interest in recording authentic Etruscan inscriptions encouraged other scholars to collect, carefully record, and attempt to decipher them accurately. In this sense, he can be said to have laid the methodological foundations for the modern study of the Etruscan language (Ligota 1987; Stephens 2004; see also Chapters 14 and 28).

2. Enhanced Etruscan Bronzes

During the nineteenth century hundreds of Etruscan bronzes were discovered, some accidentally and others through excavations, throughout Tuscany, Latium, and other parts of Italy where the Etruscans had either resided or traded. An important Latian site being explored and exploited at the time was Palestrina, ancient Praeneste. Although the ancient inhabitants of this city spoke an early form of Latin, they were strongly influenced by Etruscan culture and produced works of art that are usually classified by modern scholars as Etruscan. One of their most interesting products was a toiletries container, called a cista by archaeologists. Praenestine bronze cistae are usually made of an engraved cylindrical or ovoid container with a fitted, slightly domed lid. The container is supported, most often, by solid-cast bronze feet, while the lid can be enhanced with a solid-cast figural handle. Approximately 90 examples of these containers have survived (Bordenache Battaglia 1979; 1990).

What makes Praenestine cistae attractive to forgers is that some originally contained no engraved decorations. Why not enhance the appeal and value of such an object by supplying new engravings? Thus, the object itself is an authentic original, but the engravings on its body and/or lid may be modern forgeries. A number of such enhanced cistae were purchased by unsuspecting collectors and museums, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. One Italian, Francesco Martinetti (1833–95), is especially known for his deceptions in this area.¹ Martinetti combined all the qualities that make a successful forger of engraved bronzes. He had trained as a jeweler and engraver, was an expert restorer, and worked as an archaeologist and antiquities dealer – a combination that was not considered inappropriate in that more innocent time. He had ready access to the ancient cemeteries of Palestrina and often carried out “excavations” there. His skills as a restorer meant that he was free to remove objects that he had discovered to his studio in Rome where, we suspect, he sometimes enhanced fragmentary or undecorated bronzes with new engravings. We should also note that Martinetti was well-known as a respected antiquities dealer and many of the major scholars, connoisseurs, and collectors of Rome were his clients.

Obviously, it is impossible to know the details of a secretive forger more than a century after his death, but we strongly suspect that Martinetti was behind a number of enhanced bronzes sold to various important collectors. These include the so-called Cista Pasinati (Figure 29.1), named for the collector and dealer who first acquired it from Martinetti; the cista is now in the British Museum. Sometime before 1864, Martinetti probably discovered a fragmentary ovoid cista at Palestrina. Although the body of this artifact was engraved, it was truncated so that the upper portion of a conventional battle scene forming the main decorative frieze was missing. It is likely that this portion was already damaged in antiquity. In any case, the object’s lid was not engraved but had a standard type of statuette for its handle. In 1864, Heinrich von Brunn (1822–94), second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, delivered a much-anticipated lecture on the early history of the city. The date set for his lecture was appropriate: April 21, the traditional birthday of Rome’s founding. What a perfect time to introduce to the scholarly world a recently discovered cista that seemed, he stated innocently, “… almost made on purpose for the subject of a lecture on the Birthday of the City” (Brunn 1864: 356). The engravings on the cista’s lid illustrated characters such as Aeneas, Latinus, Turnus, and Lavinia, all familiar from Virgil’s Aeneid (cf. 12.161ff.), although they were not depicted in a specific scene from the epic. Most members of the audience were also not troubled by the fact that Virgil composed his work more than five centuries after the bronze engravers at Praeneste supposedly made the artifact.² However, within a few years, various scholars began to question the authenticity of the lid engravings. Later, after the deaths of both Martinetti and von Brunn, examinations revealed that while the lid itself was original, its engravings had been added, probably by Martinetti in 1863 (De Puma 2000).

Image described by caption and surrounding text. — **Figure 29.1** The bronze lid of the so-called Cista Pasinati, with engravings added by Italian forger, Francesco Martinetti, in 1863. London, The British Museum.
Drawing: Brunn 1864: pl. VII (top).

Similar problems occur with Praenestine bronze mirrors, some also excavated by Martinetti, and other unengraved or minimally engraved bronze mirrors from numerous Etruscan sites. The motivation is simple: museums and collectors are not especially interested in plain, undecorated ancient mirrors. Ones with elegantly engraved and recognizable narratives are far more desirable and valuable. If one has a blank mirror, why not simply add an engraved scene, something copied from an already-published mirror or, better still, wholly invented? We thus have many authentic bronze mirrors (chemical analysis proves them to be authentic) enhanced with modern engraved scenes. Some are so skillfully executed as to evade modern detection.

There are many other “Etruscan” mirrors that are wholly modern. They now seem as if they could not possibly have deceived anyone – but they did. A good example will suffice to illustrate this type of forgery. In 1955, the University Museum in Philadelphia acquired a magnificent engraved bronze mirror (Figure 29.2) from a New York art gallery. At the time, the Philadelphia curator sent photographs and measurements to one of the world’s leading authorities on Etruscan mirrors, Guido Mansuelli (1916–2001). He recognized that the engravings were not ancient but had been copied from a well-known Attic red-figured kylix by the Sosias Painter, now in Berlin. However, despite the unparalleled and excessively large diameter of the disc, he left open the possibility that the mirror itself might be ancient. It turns out that there is another mirror, unknown to Mansuelli or the curator in Philadelphia in 1955, that was probably made by the same modern forger. This second mirror, also extremely large and with engravings based on another Attic kylix in Berlin, this time by Peithinos, had been acquired by William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951). It is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (De Puma 2002: 57, figs. 4–5). Similarities in the engraving style and the mirrors themselves suggest to me that both works may be products of the same forger, probably someone working from published images of the Greek vases. Although a skilled engraver, this unknown artist was not familiar with the basic characteristics of original Etruscan mirrors. If this had been the case, he would not have made the discs so gigantic and would have realized the difference between tangs and handles. However, despite these problems, both forgeries were originally accepted as valuable ancient artifacts by a prominent private collector and museum (De Puma 2002; 2005). Indeed, they are impressive both in their scale and the confident precision of their engravings.

3. Etruscan Terracotta Forgeries

Perhaps the most famous Etruscan forgeries are the three magnificent terracotta warriors acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915, 1916 and 1921. It is not difficult to understand the appeal of these impressive, brightly painted figures. They were made between 1914 and 1920 by the highly talented members of an extended Italian family working in Orvieto. These men were not only skilled artists but also clever con men who executed an elaborate “sting operation” that snared John Marshall (1862–1928), the Metropolitan Museum’s purchasing agent in Rome. The reconstructed details of this operation have been carefully outlined in earlier reports (von Bothmer and Noble 1961; Richter 1970: 92–93); suffice it to say here that Marshall’s decision to purchase the statues cannot be credited to naiveté. He was an experienced connoisseur, arguably one of best of his generation when it came to Greek and Roman art (especially vases and classical sculpture). His acquaintance with Etruscan art was excellent but, as noted above, there was not that much large-scale Etruscan terracotta sculpture to see in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Etruscology was still in its infancy. Thus, there was almost no excavated material to compare with these new statues. For instance, the Aplu from Veii, while discovered in 1916, was not restored and published until the excavator, Giulio Quirino Giglioli, did so in 1926. This was five years after the Museum had purchased the Big Warrior, the last of the three terracottas acquired by Marshall. Of course, Marshall had seen all of these figures only in very fragmentary states.

Marshall was told that the terracotta statues came from the ruins of a recently-discovered Etruscan temple and that, because they represented warriors, it was probably a temple of Mars. All three figures had been smashed into numerous fragments but were restored after their arrival in New York. They were not publicly displayed until 1933, almost a decade after the last of the three figures had arrived in New York and five years after Marshall’s death. Gisela M.A. Richter (1882–1972), the curator at the Metropolitan, published them fully after four more years had elapsed (Richter 1937).

Provenance was always a problem. The forgers had reluctantly and tantalizingly revealed that the alleged temple site was in a field near Boccaporco, a tiny hamlet south of Orvieto. On numerous occasions Marshall tried to have the Italians arrange a visit, but he was always put off with excuses. At one point, they agreed to take him there but when they arrived, they were kept back by a uniformed policeman who firmly announced that the entire area was off-limits due to recent archaeological discoveries. Much later it was learned that the “policeman” was yet another cousin dressed for the occasion in a borrowed uniform. In 1955 when Richter tried to visit the site, she was told that a fountain had been built over the area and that there was no longer anything to see.

There was no reference to the alleged provenance in the first publications of the statues. Richter (1937: 16, 18) mentions in passing that the three statues “… are said to have been found together.” She assumes that they were in a temple but never refers to the specific site that Marshall had attempted to visit at Boccaporco.³

Once the statues were finally exhibited almost everyone, scholars and the public alike, thought they were magnificent masterpieces of late sixth century BCE Etruscan art. Photographs of these precious terracottas soon made their way into numerous books on ancient art. David Moore Robinson (1880–1958), one of America’s foremost archaeologists, also declared, in a review of Richter’s 1940 Handbook of the Etruscan Collection: “There are no better examples of Etruria’s prime and of the triumphant strength and splendor and military prowess of the Etruscans” (1944: 410).⁴ This praise echoes Richter’s assessment that the statues “show us more forcibly than anything has heretofore [Etruria’s] triumphant strength during her prime …They reflect the dauntless spirit of Etruria at the time of her greatest military strength” (1937: 5). She believed that the two standing warriors were votive offerings and that the colossal head was part of an enormous cult statue: “A polychrome terracotta Mars about twenty feet high standing in the dim light of an Etruscan temple must indeed have been an impressive sight” (Richter 1937: 16, 18).

However, as early as 1937, the young Massimo Pallottino (1909–1995), who would go on to become one of the leading Etruscologists of the twentieth century, published articles condemning all three statues on stylistic grounds and positing sources of inspiration for two of them.⁵ This situation – scholarly arguments over the authenticity of one, two or all three statues – continued for almost 25 more years. In the late 1950s, new methods of dating terracotta were developed, and spectrographic analysis of the glaze material eventually demonstrated that all three statues were modern forgeries (von Bothmer and Noble 1961). In fact, one of the forgers was still alive. Alfredo Adolfo Fioravanti, at the time working as a furniture restorer, tailor, and taxi driver in Rome, confessed to having worked with the Riccardi brothers, his late cousins, to produce the last of the three warriors. He also confessed that he had created other (architectural) terracotta forgeries sold to collectors and museums in New York, Rome, and Mannheim (von Bothmer and Noble 1961: 14–15). All of this was recorded in sworn testimony on January 5, 1961 before the American consul in Rome. Among many other things, Fioravanti revealed significant details concerning the process used to make the Metropolitan Museum’s statues, supplied a missing thumb fragment he had kept as a souvenir of the Big Warrior, and explained why the statues had been broken before firing. The answer was simple: they were too big to fit into any kiln available to the forgers at the time. Richter had offered vague reasons to explain such oddities as the heavy proportions of the Big Warrior’s upper body: “… the abnormally stocky proportions are simply due to Etruscan workmanship” or “… the curious proportions of the thighs and arms are more understandable in Etruria, where a lack of feeling for true proportions was not unusual even in the late archaic period” (Richter 1937: 8, 11). Fioravanti’s explanation was more credible. He said that he and his cousins had built the statue up from its feet to the waist, using published illustrations of the Dodona bronze warrior statuette in Berlin (Antikensammlung, Charlottenburg, inv. 7470; Löwy 1911: pl. 12, fig. 31). But then they realized that the room in which they were working was not high enough to continue with the correct proportions. The upper body had to become stockier in order for the statue to fit in their cramped studio. Details such as this demonstrate the convolutions that scholars who are seduced by a forgery will go to in order to justify their belief that an object is authentic.

Another group of terracottas presents different problems. These are statuettes each representing a seated human figure, mostly female, wearing heavy drapery. Most of these figures sit on truncated box-like containers that supposedly once held the ashes of the deceased. The ashes could be deposited through small rectangular holes (some examples preserve terracotta doors) in the backs of the figures. Scholars consider these objects late Etruscan works dating around 150–100 BCE, and they are usually “said to have come from” Chiusi or neighboring sites like Sarteano or Solaia. It is important to realize, however, that none has a secure, documented provenance, let alone an archaeological context.⁶ Most are about two feet (61 cm.) tall. There are at least 11 examples in public collections in Europe and America. Only two of these (Figures 29.3 and 29.4), acquired by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History in 1910 and never published, have been subjected to careful scientific scrutiny. I will treat them briefly here. In turn, the findings they provide have implications for the others in the related group.

Image described by caption. — **Figure 29.3** Terracotta cinerary urn in the form of a seated male figure, nineteenth century forgery. Chicago, Field Museum of Natural History.
Photo: R. D. De Puma.

Chiusi is well-known for its virtually continuous practice of cremation during the Etruscan period. The first question we should ask is: Are there other seated-figure cinerary urns from the Chiusi area? Yes, there are several. The earlier examples include the well-known series of canopic urns, many placed on associated “thrones” of terracotta or bronze, as well as the more naturalistic stone cinerary urn of a seated man discovered in the Poggio Gaiella tumulus at Chiusi in 1839–40 and now in Palermo (Sprenger and Bartoloni 1983: 96–97, figs. 64–65; Donati 2007; for canopic urns, see Gempeler 1974). A famous example, the so-called Mater Matuta from c.450 BCE shows a seated woman holding a swaddled infant. It was discovered at Chianciano in 1846 and is now in the Museo Archeologico, Florence (Sprenger and Bartoloni 1983: 129–130, figs. 182–183). Returning to the undocumented late terracotta examples, we see that they belong to a longstanding tradition of anthropomorphizing ash containers that goes back to at least the early sixth century BCE.

Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of these late cinerary urns is the strangely exaggerated drapery the seated figures wear (Johansen 1966). Perhaps this can be explained as a result of the often provincial or crude style of late Etruscan work. However, when the two Chicago urns were tested, the thermoluminescence results showed that they were modern and probably created between 100 and 150 years ago. In this regard it is interesting to note that in December 1891, Wolfgang Helbig (1839–1915) mentions in a letter to his Danish patron, Carl Jacobsen, that he had seen a number of fake Etruscan terracottas, figures wearing “baroque” folds of drapery, while visiting Sarteano, a town near Chiusi.⁷ His description is too imprecise to say that he saw either of these specific figures now in Chicago or even this type of seated-figure cinerary urn. Still, “baroque” is an appropriate description of their distinctive drapery style, and Sarteano is certainly in the right neighborhood.

Because the two terracotta urns in Chicago are definitely forgeries, does that mean that the closely related examples in European museums are also forgeries? Not necessarily. However, because all of the other examples are so similar in size, style, subject, technique and material, I strongly suspect they are. They may all be products of an Italian workshop producing terracotta urns in the late nineteenth century, perhaps at Chiusi. It is also possible that they were not made to deceive, but simply to supply a busy tourist trade interested in purchasing souvenirs. But then how do we explain that almost all the examples now in museums were purchased directly from dealers, rather than donated by collectors? (And, of course, even dealers and collectors can be the targets of forgers.) The only way to be certain about their authenticity is to subject all of them to thermoluminescence testing. Perhaps eventually this will be done.

4. Conclusions

Although space does not permit an investigation into other types of Etruscan forgeries such as jewelry, carved gems and ambers, ivories, coins, painted pottery, bucchero, small bronzes, architectural and votive terracottas, and fresco fragments, examples exist in public and private collections. The Law of Supply and Demand is the basic principle. Sometimes, a specific group or person is targeted. Fakes often seduce experts because they so desperately want to believe that an especially interesting or attractive object is genuine. Forgers know this and often exploit it with surgical precision (e.g., Brunn and the Cista Pasinati; Marshall and Richter and the Metropolitan Museum’s terracotta warriors). We see that the motivations for making forgeries can vary from simple financial gain to a perverse desire to deceive or to enhance one’s fame and reputation. To some personalities, it is very satisfying to know that you have fooled numerous experts even though you may have kept the deception hidden from your closest friends. In many cases, forgeries are not discovered until long after the forger’s death.

We have seen that, in the case of Etruscan art, there are many works like authentic undecorated bronzes that invite enhancement with new engravings that will make them more attractive, interesting, and valuable. In addition, the rather undistinguished fragments of other authentic bronzes might be ingeniously combined to create a totally new pastiche. In such cases, chemical analysis of the alloy cannot indicate a forgery because the bronzes are themselves ancient. There is no foolproof method to authenticate objects without an archaeological provenance (and, sometimes, even this cannot be trusted). The safest, but by no means foolproof, procedure is to combine the subjective opinions of art historians, archaeologists, and other connoisseurs with the more objective results of scientific analyses. However, it should be noted that even scientific tests are not always entirely objective and often scientists disagree on how to interpret results or find some flaw in laboratory procedures.

However instructive, entertaining or attractive individual forgeries and their histories may be, they are essentially destructive because they alter or falsify our comprehension of the past (see further, Chapter 30). This is a serious problem, especially for the Etruscans, where little textual documentation survives and art assumes greater significance. Although scientific analyses are more sophisticated than they were a generation ago, so are the forgers. They and their creations will always be with us, continuing to affect and color our perception of the Etruscans.

REFERENCES

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GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

There are a number of valuable, book-length treatments of the subject of ancient art forgeries, with various levels of discussion of the Etruscans. Chapter 8 in the new catalogue to the Etruscan collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (De Puma 2013) treats the terracotta warriors and several other Etruscan forgeries and pastiches in this major collection. Another study of material from the Metropolitan, written by a former director (Hoving 1996), provides a lively account treating many forgeries from different art historical periods. In the case of the Metropolitan’s terracotta warriors, Hoving posits that Marshall may have been part of a conspiracy to trick the museum, something this author does not believe probable. Mark Jones’s 1990 edited collection originates from a British Museum exhibition treating numerous forgeries from a wide variety of art historical periods, including the Etruscans. David Sox’s 1987 book tells the fascinating story of Alceo Dossena, perhaps the most talented forger of the early twentieth century, who created a number of “Etruscan” terracotta sculptures sold to American museums. Another work by Sox (1991) provides a biographical account of E. P. Warren, John Marshall and their associates at Oxford and Rome, many of whom had a profound influence on the acquisition and appreciation of antiquities (and fakes) between 1890 and 1928. More broadly, Craddock’s 2009 book provides authoritative examination of numerous scientific tools that help to determine the authenticity of antiquities.