Authentizität und Originalität antiker Bronzebildnisse: Ein gefälschtes Augustusbildnis, seine Voraussetzungen und sein Umfeld/Authenticity and Originality of Ancient Bronze Portraits: A Forged Portrait of Augustus, Its Prerequisites, and Its Surroundings

Since 1970, the International Congress on Ancient Bronzes has been held 19 times, most recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2015 where, as always, it attracted experts in many specializations. Usually an exhibition is held in conjunction with a bronze congress, as with Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World (J. Daehner and K. Lapatin, eds. [Los Angeles 2015]). Lehmann did not attend that bronze congress. His book addresses suspected bronze forgeries in a series of essays, followed by his catalogue of 32 “suspicious bronze portraits.” The 13 essays, four of them by Lehmann, derive from a forum held in 2014, at Lehmann’s home institution, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Primary subjects are the “Augustus Arete” [sic] (cat. no. 15), the “Stendal Alexander” (cat. no. 5), and two female bronzes, a bust and a head, in the Antikenmuseum in Basel (cat. nos. 2, 11).

The first of four essays about the “Augustus Arete” is by Humbel, who owns the head (17); ironically, he praises Lehmann for uncovering it as a forgery. In a separate essay, Lehmann observes the head’s “ill-tempered facial expression,” the differing profile views, the “massive bronze supports” behind the ears (not explained), and details of the hair. He deduces that this is a “homogenized portrait … the result of a creative modern forgery” (73–4).

Müller, from the Frauenhofer Institute in Fürth, which normally analyzes industrial products, tested the metal, finding the head to be a lead-tin-copper alloy, primarily copper and lead. Müller concludes that the head could not have been produced before the second century C.E. (142) but cites no data to support that conclusion. He speculates that “the head … was produced more recently, very likely manufactured by using ancient material” (146), but scrap metal was a common ingredient of statuary bronze, as mentioned by Pliny the Elder (HN 34.98). Müller’s hypothesis that ancient coins might be used to cast a modern forgery aired in a television interview with Sönje Storm (“The Mystery Conman,” Deutsche Welle, Feb. 2016, www.dw.com/en/the-mystery-conman-the-murky-business-of-counterfeit-antiques/a-18993893). The captions to his illustrations raise more questions than they answer, and the images from computer tomography (fig. 12) do not show the round chaplet holes that he reports (146).

Three essays focus on a head and torso from a statue of Alexander the Great (cat. no. 5) first exhibited in 2000 at the Winckelmann Museum in Stendal for six weeks and published by the museum’s director, Max Kunze (Alexander der Grosse: König der Welt. Eine neuentdeckte Bronzestatue [Stendal 2000]). Thereafter, the so-called Stendal Alexander disappeared from public view, presumably entering a private collection. The Stendal Alexander had come from Robin Symes, for whom Kunze provided expertise for a sales catalogue (Royal Portraits and the Hellenistic Kingdoms [New York 1999]). Lehmann labels the Stendal Alexander a forgery on the basis of stylistic comparisons that he had previously made with other portraits of Alexander (Alexander der Große – einst in Stendal: Original – Kopie – Fälschung? [Halle (Saale) 2009]). He charges Kunze (88) with not publishing an analysis of the alloy, which Kunze in fact did (Kunze [2000] 59).

In 2010, Kunze, a specialist on ancient sculpture and formerly the director of East Berlin’s Antikensammlung, brought a lawsuit against Lehmann. The court ruled that Lehmann could call the statue a fake but that he could not accuse Kunze of “willful neglection of the counterfeit suspicion” (165) or call the Museum in Stendal a “laundering institution” (175). Lück, in his essay in this volume, states that the “bust [sic] displayed typical indications of a counterfeit” (165); identifies Lehmann as “scientist” (166) and Kunze as “exhibitor” (167); and outlines the controversy, providing no references (165–67).

Lehmann suspects “an entire array of other bronze portraits that have suddenly emerged in the art trade over the last decades … [of having] a common source in a modern forgery workshop” (73–4). His pursuit of a suspected forger dubbed the “Spanish Master” has appeared in the popular press (see Schulz’s articles “Helden auf dem Prüfstand,” Spiegel Online [14 January 2008] 112–15 [www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-55411008.html]; “False Gods: ‘Ancient’ Forgeries Fool Art Markets,” Spiegel Online [23 January 2008] www.spiegel.de/international/europe/false-gods-ancient-forgeries-fool-art-markets-a-529532.html; “Schwindel am Schmelzofen,” Der Spiegel 47 [2011] 160–63). In one of his two chapters here on the subject, Lehmann states that “examination and investigations” (87) published in Der Spiegel link the Stendal Alexander to that forger, along with three other heads offered for sale by Symes ([1999] cat. nos. 3, 27, 29; cat. nos. 8–10 herein). In his final chapter, Lehmann reveals that the “Spanish Master” refers to one or more creators of large bronzes in Hellenistic or Roman styles and that these works “emerged primarily in the Anglo-Saxon art trade in the 1970s,” their provenances unreported. “Plaster casts of ancient portraits were called upon and used to produce the [Spanish Master’s] casting molds and … they were then reworked or … modified and then newly assembled, so that imitations based on ancient archetypes were created.” Each head “has an individual and emotional facial expression that is admittedly appealing to people today, but that does not correlate with ancient portraits” (184). Stylistic rather than technical features are the basis for these conclusions.

The journalist Storm recounts Lehmann’s various investigations (173–77). At the 18th International Congress on Ancient Bronzes (see E. Deschler-Erb and P. Della Casa, eds., New Research on Ancient Bronzes: Acta of the XVIIIth International Congress on Ancient Bronzes [Zürich 2015]), Lehmann spoke about two female bronzes in Basel (cat. nos. 2, 11), but he did not answer my questions at the session; he claims here to have withdrawn his paper from the publication (90). Nor did Lehmann accept the offer of Andrea Bignasca, director of Basel’s Antikenmuseum, to collaborate on a study of the female heads. Here he reiterates claims that he made through Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle that the Stendal Alexander, a head of Geta, and the two heads in Basel are all forgeries by the “Spanish Master” (87–91). Permission was not sought to include metallurgical analyses done in 2012 by the Paz Laboratorien für Archäometrie (93–105), which suggest that the heads are Roman. Müller’s analyses of the Augustus Arete (cat. no. 1) and one head in Basel (cat. no. 2) lead him to conclude that both bronzes are probably “made of the same basic material” (159).

Lehmann questions the Roman bronze Artemis and deer formerly in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which he believes may have been cast ca. 1800; their current “location [is] unknown…. Materials testing and an examination of the patina could provide clarification” (32). In fact, the production methods of both the figures and the base were examined and X-rayed, the metal was analyzed (EPMA and ICP-MS), and the work was exhibited in The Fire of Hephaistos (published in the catalogue of the same name by the reviewer with H. Lie [Cambridge, Mass. 1996] cat. no. 35, 274–82). In 2007, the Albright-Knox sold the Artemis group to a private collector; since then, it has since then been on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in 2015–2016, it was lent to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for exhibition in Power and Pathos.

Lehmann also questions a head of Alexander the Great (cat. no. 6) that he has not seen: “It would be going too far here to state the reasons for suspicion in detail that this coarse and from an iconographical stand point unusual ‘Portrait of Alexander’ is indeed a modern forgery, especially since I have not been able to locate its whereabouts” (32). Like the Artemis group, the head is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: its origin may be unknown, but its technical features suggest to me that its authenticity should not be questioned.

Lehmann attributes most, if not quite all, of the 32 “suspicious bronze portraits” in his catalogue (189–253) to the “Spanish Master.” Catalogue number 1, a head of the Doryphoros that was cast after a marble from Pompeii (Naples, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 6011) is, he believes, an early work (185): the “Hellenistic” date refers to when the marble was produced. Other bronzes on the list came from statues, herms, busts, and tondi. Lehmann contends that many of the heads, like the “goddess” (cat. no. 2), cannot be identified, that very few analyses have been conducted on the heads, that some of the heads were “ripped” from statues, and that he has found little published information about them. He has not seen many of the works himself; he does not consider production methods of even those that he has seen (which might well have shown that they were not produced in a single workshop); he has not tracked down locations (e.g., cat. no. 7  has been in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art since the 1980s: see M.A. Del Chiaro and A.F. Stewart, Classical Art: Sculpture [Santa Barbara, Calif. 1985]); he lacks comparanda, notably from the Roman provinces, and seems unfamiliar with the scholarly literature (e.g., Los bronces romanos en España: Mayo–julio 1990, Palacio de Velázquez [Madrid 1990]; Gebrochener Glanz: Römische Grossbronzen am UNESCO-Welterbe Limes [Bonn 2014]; and cat. no. 12 was in The Fire of Hephaistos, cat. no. 45, 314–18); he does not use scientific analyses correctly (similar levels of major elements in alloys of cat. nos. 2 and 15 do not prove a link); and he does not take into account that idiosyncratic production may point to a particular workshop’s practice.

Two essays have no bearing on antiquities, and two others do not relate to the bronzes under consideration. Kulenkampff addresses forgeries of modern art and Walter Benjamin’s theories about “multiplication techniques” (52–6). Weitmann tries to figure out the meanings of “original” and “forgery” by way of Francis I, Benjamin, Wackenroder, Duchamp, and de Chirico (63–7). Stutzinger states only that a successful forgery is a rare thing (112–15). And Peltz cautions: “It seems completely unnecessary to list the technical inconsistencies of recently examined bronzes here, so as to not make such information available for everybody” (125).

Disorganization in this book makes it difficult to track Lehmann’s arguments about specific works. The English translation of the German text is problematic, with errors, misspellings, and peculiar word usage and syntax. Whether the 32 bronzes are modern forgeries by a “Spanish Master,” we still need, for each one, technical analyses and information about production, type, assembly, corrosion products, damages, and repairs. We need evidence before conclusions. The proceedings of the many International Congresses on Ancient Bronzes will provide a better introduction to ancient bronzes and to modern forgeries.

Carol C. Mattusch
George Mason University
mattusch@gmu.edu