The use of the terms look-a-like, fake, fraud, and forgery all imply with various shades of conviction the deliberate attempt to deceive by the production of a work of art in a style or material not genuine by an artist or craftsman who imitates the work of others. The usual or more obvious motive for fakery is simple financial profit.
We were curious if we could unearth any shenanigans with respect to the artwork of Giuseppe Armani. At his desk with a computer, it took our diligent curator sleuth about ten minutes of investigative effort on an auction website to ferret out some blatant but seemingly rather "minor" deceptions:
There is nothing funny about spending hard-earned money for Armani art and finding out that you were the target of chicanery. And if the aforementioned instances of deceptive practices were isolated, one could even write some of them off as "innocent mistakes". Yet, our curator found misrepresentations to be pervasive on auction sites, when 73 out of 100 listings for Armani art, a whopping 73%, were riddled with inaccuracies, misrepresentations, lies, and flagrant deceptive practices. Moreover, all auction site misrepresentations we discovered appeared to be intentionally deceptive since they all existed as an attempt to enhance the values of the items offered for sale. No misrepresentation our curator found gave the impression it was designed to decrease the value of an item in the mind of the shopper.
We had our curator press on. We were looking for the bigger fish. Was there such a thing as look-a-like or forged Armani art? Could consumers be fooled and subsequently ripped off by buying a fake?
For only consecutive six days, auction site searches were made daily for: Giuseppe Armani, Armani Figurines, Armani Sculptures, and Armani Statues. Bingo! It didn't take long to find a figurine offered for sale as an "Armani Figurine" that seemed suspicious, one that our curator could not reconcile, one that a consumer would be lead to believe was authentic. Of course, we bought the look-a-like Armani to show that knock offs and fakes exist. We offer the image published here as both concrete evidence and to serve as notice to consumers. As with mice, we know that if we found one knock-off there has to be others.
In a history of faked and forged sculpture, some specific cases may serve as general examples. While traveling in Egypt in the 1870s, Amelia Edwards, English novelist and later cofounder of the Egypt Exploration fund, inadvertently discovered a faker's workshop in Luxor. Before the mistake was revealed, she was able to examine the tools of the faker as well as the fragments of ancient wood from coffins and tomb furniture already prepared for the production of fake sculpture. The use of ancient materials would have given carvings made from them a genuine appearance and "feel," the easy solution to a technical problem. The art of forgery in Egypt has had a long history and has been practiced ever since there have been collectors to deceive. The use of old materials and clever methods of aging new works has resulted in numerous Egyptian "antiquities" that have long escaped detection. The types of forgeries Edwards saw now have considerable age in their own right and consequently are even more difficult to detect. The art of the faker in modern Egypt has continued to the present, but the products of such workshops are intended for the most part for the unwary tourists and collectors.
The taste of 19th-century Europe and a revived interest in the arts of antiquity also gave rise to a wave of virtuoso stone carvers. The career of Giovanni Bastianini provides a classic example of this skill taken a step further and turned into forgery. A talented and skillful sculptor in his own right, he specialized in work of the Renaissance in the styles of Mino de Fiesole and Desiderio de Settignano, and his works were readily accepted as genuine products of the Renaissance. It was generally believed that it was not the artist who misrepresented his work as antique but others who did so for profit. In 1886 the Louvre purchased a portrait bust by Bastianini for the reputed 14,000 francs in the belief that it was a Renaissance work by someone of the stature of Donatello or Andrea del Verrocchio. When it was revealed that the work was a contemporary product by a relatively unknown Italian artist, the experts who praised it were loath to admit that they had been fooled. Alceo Dossena, a spiritual descendent of Bastianini, was an even more infamous sculptor of the 20th century. He was also one of the best-known examples of a versatile forger able to imitate many styles of sculpture, from ancient Greek and Etruscan prototypes to works of the Italian Renaissance. Dossena maintained that the dealers who sold his "imitations" as genuine duped him, but he always produced his work, as far as he was able, with careful attention to material and technique, as well as to fidelity to period style. Museums acquired a number of his and Bastianini's and Dossena's pieces for their collections with full faith that they were authentic.
The case involving a group of colossal terracotta figures in Etruscan style illustrates an example from another cultural tradition. Long treasured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), they were eventually proved to be produced by Italian ceramic workers early in the 20th century. Small ancient terracotta prototypes provided the inspiration and design for these pieces. The large forgeries were intentionally damaged to give the appearance of age. Eventually, scholars cast doubt on them for stylistic reasons and not at first on scientific evidence.
In the 1920s a carver thought to have worked in Berlin, who specialized in ancient Egyptian reliefs, produced work in styles ranging from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period in wood and several different types of stone. He was unable, however, to conceal his own hand regardless of the period he imitated. When scholars identified his personal style nearly half a century later, it became clear that his pieces shared other characteristics. Most of his products were single heads in relief, and almost all were of a type that can be termed a "neat fragment"-that is, a piece made as a fragment of a larger composition with no significant parts of the design damaged.
In the 1960s stone sculpture from the Cycladic Islands dating from the 3rd millennium BCE and terracotta animal figures from northwest Iran from the early 1st millennium both became popular subjects for the faker. In both instances, the abstract quality of the ancient originals appeared to a modern aesthetic as much as their apparent simplicity of form facilitated the imitation of the styles. The clay of the figures from Iran could be tested for age; the stone of the spurious "Cycladic" figures was a more difficult material to test because only the surface can be demonstrated to have aged or acquired patina, and most of these objects had apparently been subjected to harsh cleaning. The specialized study of the artistic style of these "Cycladic" figures, developed by art historians only in recent decades, in combination with intense scientific scrutiny, led to uncovering some of the frauds.
In the history of fraud, the first line of examination has usually been the experience of the art expert and knowledge of the history and style. This was surely the case in the exposing of the Armani figurine fraud, one that could fool consumers, but not the keen eye of our curator. However, more scientific methods have been developed to test accurately the materials and techniques employed by the forger of sculpture, but these are generally considered as aids and not ends in themselves. The use of advanced scientific techniques has certainly made it more possible to prove the fraudulence of some modern faking of ancient material. Microscopic examination of the surface of stone sculpture, for example, will reveal much about supposed old surfaces, patinas, tools, and carving techniques employed. Minute analysis of the surface will also identify the material of which tools were made. Examination by ultraviolet and infrared illumination will often give further evidence of surface condition and structural damage. X-ray defraction and metal sampling for spectroscopic analysis may help to determine the alloy constituents of metal sculpture. The revelation of fakes in sculpture depends on a certain amount of detective work. The skill of the curator and the eye of the connoisseur, supported by the advanced scientific aids now available, have made the task somewhat more certain. Even so, many questionable works of art still remain in museums and private homes, for which authenticity (or lack of it) has yet to be proven.