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# At the close of 1983 the art dealer Gianfranco Becchina approached the Getty Museum in California, offering to sell it a beautifully preserved marble statue of the 6th century BC for a record 10 million dollars
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/na-iskhode-1983-goda-v-muzei-getti-v-kalifornii-obratilsia-artdiler-dzhanfranko-bekkina-kotoryi-predlozhil-vykupit-u-nego-prekrasno-sokhranivshuiusia-mramornuiu-statuiu-vi-v-do-n-e-za-r/
- Published: 2024-10-20T09:34:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:21.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Art, Museums, Science

At the close of 1983 the art dealer Gianfranco Becchina approached the Getty Museum in California, offering to sell it a beautifully preserved marble statue of the 6th century BC for a record 10 million dollars. The museum people naturally took the two-metre kouros away for examination, which pointed to a stylistic likeness to a known kouros in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

In all, some 200 such sculptures of a youth with arms stretched along the body and one leg advanced have been found, so every new one might count as a discovery, the more so in such flawless condition.

The museum invited a geologist, who took a sample of the marble and showed that the dolomitic marble of the statue came from the island of Thasos, while a layer of calcite testified to the antiquity of the object, since dolomite calcifies over millennia. In short, the age of the statue was proven, and therefore there could be no doubt of its authenticity.

The kouros came with a bundle of documents on its provenance: the sculpture had been bought in the 1930s from the collection of the Swiss doctor Lauffenberger, who had acquired it from the fairly well-known Greek antiquities dealer Roussos.

Fourteen months after receiving the kouros, the museum's staff came to a decision to buy. When the two-thousand-year-old youth was first shown to the public, the New York Times responded with a front-page article, and art historians sang hymns to so precious an addition to the American treasury. One of only twelve completely preserved kouroi in the world: that has a ring to it!

The museum community, however, was not of one mind: the rapturous reviews were set against the sceptics.

Federico Zeri, a member of the Getty's board of trustees, was displeased with the statue's fingernails. Evelyn Harrison, the foremost scholar of Greek sculpture, regretted that the museum had spent such enormous sums on this purchase: she simply did not like the kouros. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, found the statue too new, as though it had not lain in the ground for a thousand years, nor a hundred, nor even a few decades. The director of the Acropolis, George Despinis, expressed the same opinion. The statue was sent to a specially convened symposium of leading specialists in the sculpture of that period in Greece. Its style struck Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum, as alien. Its rejection was voiced also by Georgios Dontas, head of the Athens Archaeological Society.

Could it be a forgery? And why had the museum so readily parted with so considerable a sum for so unconvincing a find? The museum commissioned repeat examinations and turned to lawyers. The answer came from vigilant bureaucrats: it turned out that the bundle of documents supplied by the seller of the kouros contained outright forgeries. There were counterfeit postal stamps bearing postcodes that did not exist at the time the letter was supposedly written, and references to bank accounts opened eight years after the receipts were issued. These facts plainly showed that the provenance of the acquisition was false.

Is it any wonder that, after such discoveries, a more thorough stylistic analysis proved the kouros to have been cobbled together from disparate elements borrowed by its maker from various well-known statues in Greek and American museums? The last hopes of the museum people were dispelled a few years later by the remarkable resemblance in appearance, proportions and material between this kouros and a smaller forgery of 1980 found in Switzerland.

As for the geologist's conclusion on the age of the statue, here too a regrettable error had crept in: another specialist at once said that such ageing could be achieved in a very short time by exposing the marble to potato mould.

Nevertheless, the exhibit remains to this day in the Getty's collection, albeit with a label stating that the sculpture by an unknown master, dated 530 BC, may be a modern forgery, but that is not certain :)

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