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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 Open the ORCID record for Christos Tsirogiannis [Opens in a new window] ,
David W.J. Gill Open the ORCID record for David W.J. Gill [Opens in a new window]  and
Christopher Chippindale
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
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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.

Keywords

Cycladic figuresIllicit antiquitiesForgeriesAntiquities market
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 369 - 385
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

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