Fakes that museums took over the originals. Photo

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And experts are sometimes wrong.

Art forgery is a very real threat to museums constantly have to deal. From time to time in many museums there are fake artifacts which can be exhibited for several years before experts understand that it was a fake. For counterfeiters high price tags attached to these hoaxes are often enough incentive to continue to create fakes. Swindlers in art often go all out to deceive the museums, so they acquired their work. Some fakes are so good that historians and archaeologists it is difficult to distinguish them from the real things. Among the museums that have become the victims of counterfeiting, even the famous Louvre, where for many years exhibited a good copy instead of the originals, and none of this even had no idea, reports the Chronicle.info with reference for a Fresher.

1. Three Etruscan warrior

In 1933 the Metropolitan Museum of art in new York added to its exhibition of three new works of art. It was a sculpture of three soldiers of the ancient Etruscan civilization. The seller, art dealer named Pietro Stettiner, claimed that the sculptures were made in the fifth century BC. Italian archaeologists first expressed concern that the statues might be forgeries. However, the curators of the Museum refused to heed the warning because they believed that they were able to acquire works of art at a reasonable price and didn’t want to lose them. Later, other archaeologists have noted that the statues were unusual shapes and sizes for works of art created at that time.

Part of the body was also fashioned in unequal proportions, and the whole collection was almost no damage. The Museum found out the truth only in 1960 when the archaeologist Joseph noble recreated samples of statues using the same techniques that the Etruscans, and declared that the statues in the Metropolitan Museum could not be made by the Etruscans. Investigation showed that Stettiner was part of a large group of counterfeiters who conspired to create the statues and sell them. The team has copied the sculptures from collections in several museums, including the Metropolitan. One of the soldiers was copied from an image of a Greek statue in the book of Berlin Museum. The head of another soldier was copied from the picture on this Etruscan vase, which is exhibited in the Museum.

The sculptures were also disproportionate body parts because they were too big for the Studio, and it forced the counterfeiters to reduce the size of some parts. One of the sculptures was not hands because the forgers could not choose which gesture to mimic a hand.

2. The Persian mummy

In 2000, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan almost was embroiled in a diplomatic row over the mummy and coffin of an unidentified 2600-year-old Princess. The remains, which are usually called the “Persian mummy”, was discovered when staff members of the Pakistani police raided the house in Haran after receiving a tip regarding the fact that the owner is illegally trying to sell Antiques. The owner was a Sardar Wali Ricky, who tried to sell a mummy to an unknown buyer for 35 million pounds.

Ricky claimed that he found the mummy and coffin after the earthquake. Soon Iran claimed ownership of the mummy, considering that the village Ricky was located directly on its boundary. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan at the time, later joined the “battle for the mummy”. The mummy was sent to the national Museum of Pakistan and put on display. Already there, the archaeologists found that some parts of the coffin looks suspicious too modern.

In addition, there was no evidence that any of the tribes in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan ever mummified their dead. Further analysis showed that in fact the mummy is the remains of 21-year-old woman, who could be the murder victim. She was sent to the morgue, and the police arrested Ricky and his family.

3. Fragments of the Dead sea scrolls

The Dead sea scrolls is a collection of handwritten scrolls containing Jewish religious texts. They were created about 2000 years ago and are among the oldest written records of Jewish biblical passages. Most of the scrolls and fragments are stored in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and some are in the hands of private collectors and museums, including the Museum of the Bible in Washington (five fragments). However, in 2018, it turned out that in Washington he kept the forgery. The fraud was discovered after the fragments were sent to Germany for analysis after the experts raised the alarm. It turned out that the Museum spent millions of dollars on the purchase of counterfeit fragments of the scroll.

4. A number of works in the Brooklyn Museum

In 1932, the Brooklyn Museum has received 926 works of art from the estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, who died a year earlier. These were paintings, jewelry, woodwork and pottery from ancient Rome, Chinese Qing dynasty and the Renaissance. Colonel Friedsam presented the Museum with priceless art objects, provided that his family will receive permission during the sale or withdrawal from exposure of any subject. This condition has become a problem decades later, when the Museum found that 229 of the works of art are fakes.

The Brooklyn Museum could not be removed from the stand fakes, because the last of the descendants of Colonel Friedsam died half a century ago. The Museum also is unable to throw them away because the Association of American museums, has strict rules governing the storage of works of art. In 2010, the Brooklyn Museum has addressed in court with the request to decommission these hoaxes.

5. Pocket watch Henlein

Peter Henlein was a mechanic and inventor who lived in Germany between 1485 and 1542. Most have not even heard his name, but all know and use his invention: a pocket watch. Henlein invented the clock, when I replaced the heavy weights used in watches, on a lighter spring, which allowed him to reduce the size of the watch. One of the alleged early works of Henlein is kept in the Germanic national Museum in Germany since 1897. That pocket watch is reminiscent of a small jar and placed in the palm of your hand. However, around them, a scandal broke out when some historians began to argue that the so-called clock Henlein are fake and not original (despite the fact that the inscription on the inside back cover of hours was that they were made by Peter Henlein in 1510).

In the report of 1930 stated that the inscription was added years later after the watch was presumably made. Later tests showed that most of the watch parts were manufactured in the nineteenth century, i.e., it is a fake. However, other experts suggest that the pieces were made while trying to fix the clock.

6. Almost all the exhibits at the Mexican Museum of San Francisco

In 2012, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco has received the status of partner of the Smithsonian. This status allows the Museum to borrow and to lend works of art in more than 200 museums and institutions with the status of the partner. However, the Smithsonian institution requires that museums member confirmed the authenticity of their collections, before they can begin to borrow works of art.

In 2017, the Mexican Museum found that only 83 of the first 2,000 works of art, which he appreciated, was genuine. It is extremely alarmed experts, given that only in the Museum’s collection of 16,000 works of art. According to experts, half of the Museum inventory is counterfeit. Some of them were deliberately created in order to pass them off as originals, while others were originally intended for decoration. Some even were not connected with the Mexican culture. A huge number of fakes is not surprising, considering that the Museum received most of its collections from patrons and did not bother to confirm their authenticity.

7. Princess Amarna

In 2003, the city Council of Leicester, Leicester, UK, decided to buy some new artwork for your local Museum. The choice fell on an allegedly 3,300-year-old statue called “Amarna Princess”, shows the relative of Pharaoh Tutankhamun of ancient Egypt. The sellers of the statue claimed that it was excavated in Egypt. This statement was confirmed by the British Museum, who found no signs of fraud after inspecting the statue. Satisfied that the city Council of Bolton have paid £ 440,000 for the statue, which was exhibited in the Museum.

A few years later the Museum of Bolton found that the British Museum was wrong. The statue was a forgery, the handiwork of Sean Gringore, the infamous forger who created fake works of art and sold them to museums as the originals. Ironically Grinols lived in Bolton and there created this sculpture. In 2007, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.

8. The Golden crown in the Louvre

In 1800 years the two men contacted the jeweler Israel Rukhomovsky in Odessa (now. Ukraine) to order a Golden crown in the Greek style as a gift to a friend-archaeologist. In fact, in men there was no friend, the archaeologist, and they wanted to sell the crown as an original work of art from ancient Greece. The fraudsters claimed that the crown was a gift of the Greek king of the Scythian king in the third century BC. Several British and Austrian museums refused to buy the crown, but the fraudsters got lucky when the Louvre bought it for 200,000 francs.

Some archaeologists have expressed concern that the crown could be a fake shortly after it was exhibited in the Louvre. However, no one listened, because they were not French. Archaeologists were right in 1903, when a friend Rukhomovsky told the jeweler that I saw his work at the Louvre. Rukhomovsky went to France with the picture to prove that he actually made a crown. A century later, the Israel Museum borrowed the crown from the Louvre and put it as an original work Rukhomovsky.

9. More than half of the paintings in the Museum of Etienne Terrus

Museum of étienne Terrus — a little-known Museum in the French Elne, which exhibits the work of French painter étienne terrus of born in the Elne in 1857. In 2018, the Museum added to its collection of 80 new paintings. However, it was soon discovered that about 60 percent of all Museum collections are fakes, which have identified experts who were invited to catalogue new items. In several pictures also were depicted buildings that were not yet built at the time when Terrus was alive. Further analysis showed that 82 out of 140 paintings stored in the Museum are fakes. Most of them were purchased in the period from 1990 to 2010.

10. Everything in the Museum of art fakes

Museum of art fakes is a real Museum in Vienna, Austria dedicated exclusively to the forged artifacts and works of art. For example, it has pages from the diary of Adolf Hitler, who actually was made by the forger Konrad of Kuau. The Museum divides its collection on forgery, designed to simulate the style of a more famous artist, forgery, held for sale as previously unknown works of the famous artist, and forgery, intended to issue the originals of the already famous works of art. It also has a category for works of art that are replicas made by the artists after the death of the original artist.

Such works are quite popular among collectors, despite the fact that they never considered original. In the Museum of counterfeiting there is an exhibition of the notorious forgers such as Tom Keating, who created over 2,000 fake works of art for his life. Keating intentionally made mistakes in their art that they could identify fakes before sale. He called these deliberate mistakes “ticking bombs”.

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