Three Fake Modigliani Heads Found in a Livorno Canal in 1984

I read that during the celebration of Modigliani's centenary in his native city of Livorno in the summer of 1984, the Progressive Museum of Modern Art of Livorno conceived a large exhibition of his sculptures and resolved to test the legend that he had thrown several works rejected by the public into the city canal.

The curators Vera and Dario Durbè obtained permission from the municipality and spent several days cleaning the bottom with a special dredger, while a crowd of spectators watched the work. A great deal of rubbish came up from the bed, but in the end three stone heads with elongated features, characteristic of Modigliani, were pulled out of the silt. Several critics swiftly pronounced them genuine, and tourists began streaming to Livorno.

Some time later three local students, Pietro Luridiana, Michele Ghelarducci and Pierfrancesco Ferrucci, told journalists that they had carved one of the heads as a joke with an electric drill, and to prove their words they made another head on live television. Then the artist Angelo Froglia, who worked in the Livorno port, declared that he had made the other two heads. Froglia did not regard his undertaking as a prank. He called it an artistic action and wanted to show how easily a forgery leads experts astray. Only one person, the collector Carlo Pepi, recognised the heads as fakes from the very start and observed that they had been made by different hands.

The museum had to close the exhibition early, and later it ceased to exist.

Although about 25 sculptures by Modigliani have survived to this day, he considered himself first and foremost a sculptor; however, illness and the high cost of materials forced him to abandon stone carving