The routine suppression and invention of provenances that characterize the trade facilitate the entry onto the market and into collections and museums of forged pieces. The best way to be certain of an artifact’s authenticity is to know its archaeological find spot and its history since excavation. For a piece with no provenance, clearly this is not possible. The authenticity of an unprovenanced piece can be judged only through scientific analysis or expert opinion, and neither method is foolproof.
For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has on display a Cycladic figurine depicting a seated person playing a harp. It was acquired in 1947 with no published provenance and is considered to be one of the museum’s most important pieces, certainly in terms of its prehistoric collections. Some experts, however, have long doubted the figurine’s authenticity because of its abnormally long arms, made necessary by its incorrect hold of the harp, and other unusual features of anatomical detail. In 2000, it was revealed by a British artist that in January 1947 he had met a local sculptor on the Cycladic island of Ios who claimed to have been commissioned some years earlier by an Athenian antiquities dealer to produce a marble figurine of a harpist. The islander made a sketch of the figurine he had made, and it shows a remarkable similarity to the piece in the Metropolitan. If the figurine drawn in the sketch really is one and the same as the Metropolitan example, it means that the Metropolitan must have been duped into buying a fake. Not surprisingly, the Metropolitan is not convinced by this argument, and the piece remains on display. But the shadow of doubt that now hangs over the figurine’s credibility as a genuine artifact will only be dispelled by the publication of reliable information about its discovery and excavation, if indeed it was excavated.
The issue of forgery is probably more acute than generally suspected. Oscar Muscarella, ironically of the Metropolitan Museum, has identified hundreds of what he believes to be forgeries of Near Eastern artifacts, or genuine artifacts that have been subject to contemporary ‘enhancement’ to improve their monetary value, and he considers this number to be very much a minimum one. If Muscarella is right, and as the pieces he discusses have no documented provenance it is hard to prove him wrong, the infiltration of fakes into collections is more widespread that previously thought possible and poses a serious threat to scholarship.
World History
