Fallen Warriors

For more than 30 years, the U.S. public has particularly favored a gallery in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art that displayed sculptures of three Etruscan warriors said to be 2,300 years old.

One is a helmeted head nearly five feet tall. The two others are fierce full-length figures girded for battle. Of the world's Etruscan treasures,* these three were regarded by some scholars as among the finest--until last week. For the first time in its history, the Met had to announce that it was housing a fake.

The three sculptures had impressive credentials. Each came to the museum in fragments that looked as if they had been worn by the centuries. A noted ceramics expert, the late Charles Binns, analyzed the pieces, concluded that the glaze that covered them was ancient Greek black, the secret of which was lost during the Roman Empire and not rediscovered until 1942. The evidence was persuasive as far as the museum was concerned, and the three warriors were given a gallery almost entirely to themselves.

But one doubter persistently questioned their authenticity. "I was always suspicious of them stylistically," says Boston-born Harold Woodbury Parsons, 78, who, after graduating in science at Harvard, turned to art and spent most of his life buying European art for U.S. museums. "I sensed something wrong."

Old Man's Tale. Living in retirement in Rome, Parsons began an investigation of the Etruscans two years ago. He talked to dealers around town: "There are no secrets in Rome. It's the most gossipy city in the world." He kept hearing the name of a certain Alfredo Fioravanti. Fioravanti, who is just Parsons' age, was eking out a living as a repairman of antiques and jewelry. Parsons got to know him well, and in time had his story.

About 60 years ago, Fioravanti said, he happened to meet two brothers named Riccardi who specialized in mending ancient pottery for Italian antique dealers. Though a tailor at the time, Fioravanti became fascinated by the business, soon had a job in the Riccardi shop. Then one day the three men got an idea: If they could mend ancient works of art, why could they not also create them from scratch?

Bigger & Bigger. The men started with fragments, then small whole pieces, finding a ready market among crooked and gullible dealers. In 1914, they went to work on their masterpieces--three outsized Etruscan figures. As model for one standing warrior, they used a photograph of a little statue that is now in Berlin's Old Museum. For the big head, they used a small terra-cotta vase-head that--ironically--is now owned by the Met. And for the second standing warrior, they used a photograph of a figure on an Etruscan sarcophagus that the British Museum had bought. Perhaps, being conscientious forgers, they would never have used the sarcophagus had they known that some 20 years later the British Museum would withdraw it as a fake (TIME, Feb. 17).

They painted the unfired creations in the Etruscan manner, then broke them into pieces because they did not have the huge kilns that the Etruscans had. After firing the fragments, they smeared them with mud and turned them over to a dealer who is now dead. Fioravanti guesses that one of the figures fetched the dealer at least $40,000, but "all we got," says he ruefully, "was a few hundred."

The Fit. Last month Harold Parsons took Fioravanti to the U.S. consulate and had him make a signed confession of the forgery. With that in hand, Parsons sent off a letter to the Met in Manhattan. The Met was not too surprised: its own ceramics expert, Joseph V. Noble, had already completed a series of chemical tests on the statues. His major finding: the famous Greek-black glaze actually contained a modern coloring agent, manganese dioxide.

Director James Rorimer dispatched his curator of Greek and Roman art to Rome. Curator Dietrich von Bothmer confronted Fioravanti in Parsons' apartment. Von Bothmer produced a plaster cast of one of the warrior's hands, from which the thumb was missing. Fioravanti in turn produced a thumb of baked pottery that he had been keeping for years. Placed together, thumb and hand fitted perfectly.

* From the ancient confederation of Etruria, which dominated the Italian peninsula, was later swallowed up by Rome.

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