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To: count-your-change
"...and very good fakes have been authenticated too."

Like the "ossuary of James." It was initially authenticated at the highest academic levels but was later shown to be fake.

77 posted on 09/21/2012 4:22:06 AM PDT by circlecity
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To: circlecity
Or the (in)famous Greek statue, a kouros, purchased by the Getty museum for millions of dollars.
A wonderful piece of work like a similar one found and purchased by Getty.

But the thing was probably fake, certainly the documentation for it was faked. The Getty could never admitt it got burned and I think the statue was quietly put away.

Wikipedia introduces the kouros question quite well:

“Provenance
The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiri Frel.

Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Malibu along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue’s authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer.

No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851).

Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.[6] The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate hoax and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983.”

Even the “experts” get burned.

80 posted on 09/21/2012 6:33:39 AM PDT by count-your-change (You don't have to be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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