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# The Getty Museum acquired a 6th century BC kouros that proved a probable forgery
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/pered-novym-godom-u-menia-dlia-vas-uvlekatelnaia-istoriia-o-vosmidesiatykh-drevnei-statue-i-sobranii-iskusstva-pola-getti/
- Published: 2019-12-28T13:19:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:05:54.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Art, Museums, Mores

Before the New Year, a gripping tale for you of the eighties, an ancient statue and the Getty collection.

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

In all, some 200 such sculptures of a youth with arms stretched along his body and one foot 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 statue's dolomitic marble came from the island of Thasos, while a layer of calcite testified to the object's antiquity, since dolomite takes millennia to calcify. 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 from the collection of a Swiss doctor, Lauffenberger, who had held it since the 1930s, having acquired it from the rather well-known Greek antiquities dealer Roussos.

Fourteen months after receiving the kouros, the museum's staff resolved to buy it. 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 fully preserved kouroi in the world: that has a ring to it!

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

Federico Zeri, a member of the Getty's board of trustees, disliked the statue's fingernails. Evelyn Harrison, the foremost scholar of Greek sculpture, lamented 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 lain in the ground neither for a thousand years, nor for a hundred, nor even for 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. The style of the statue struck Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum, as alien. Rejection was voiced too by the head of the Archaeological Society of Athens, Georgios Dontas.

Could it really be a fake? And why had the museum parted so readily with such a considerable sum for an unconvincing find? The museum commissioned repeat examinations and turned to lawyers. The answer came from vigilant bureaucrats: it emerged that the bundle of documents supplied by the seller of the kouros contained outright forgeries. There were counterfeit postmarks 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 indicated that the provenance of the acquisition was false.

Is it any wonder that, after such revelations, a more careful stylistic analysis proved the kouros to have been stitched together from disparate elements borrowed by its maker from various famous statues in Greek and American museums? The museum's last hopes were dispelled a few years later by the extraordinary resemblance in appearance, proportions and material between this kouros and a smaller forgery of 1980 found in Switzerland.

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

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