terça-feira, 13 de novembro de 2012

Original or forgery: what is the point?

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros. The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, in 1985 for $7 million and first exhibited there in October 1986.
Despite initial favourable scientific analysis of the patina and aging of the marble, the question of its authenticity has persisted from the beginning. Subsequent demonstration of an artificial means of creating the de-dolomitization observed on the stone has prompted a number of art historians to revise their opinions of the work. If genuine, it is one of only twelve extant complete kouroi. If fake, it exhibits a high degree of technical and artistic sophistication by an as-yet unidentified forger. Its status remains undetermined: today the museum's label reads "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery".

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