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The Forger’s tale: an insider’s account of corrupting the corpus of Cycladic figures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2022

Christos Tsirogiannis*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Museum of Ancient Art, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
David W.J. Gill
Affiliation:
Centre for Heritage, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom
Christopher Chippindale
Affiliation:
McDonald Institute of Archaeology, Downing Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author: Christos Tsirogiannis, email: christos.tsirogiannis@cantab.net

Abstract

Many of the known Cycladic figures – the late prehistoric human-shaped sculptures from the Aegean archipelago – came from twentieth-century illicit excavations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also known that figures were being faked at the time and perhaps also earlier: a few fakes have been identified, whilst other figures are under suspicion. Interviews with a man who faked Cycladic figures in the 1980s and 1990s give us a first insider’s autobiographical account of the forging business. This article offers, step-by-step, the method that two forgers developed to create fake figures, to treat them so that they appeared ancient, and to sell them on. The forger has identified a few of these forgeries from photographs of figures; his story is consistent with other information and seems to ring true. By verifying various elements in the forger’s testimony – from names of well-known figures in the modern antiquities market to small details and dates – we have been able to evaluate the validity of the narrative; to use it in order to uncover the true paths that fake objects followed into various collections; and to highlight valuable provenance information that no one involved in trading these objects was ever willing to provide.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

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