The Met’s Etruscan Warriors — three giant fakes the museum displayed for decades

Between 1915 and 1918 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired three monumental terracotta statues said to be ancient Etruscan warriors, and from 1933 it exhibited them as treasures of its antiquities collection. They were forgeries, made in the Italian countryside in the early twentieth century by a family of skilled potters and sold into the antiquities trade. The deception held for roughly a quarter-century of public display and was settled in 1961 by two converging proofs: a chemical analysis of the glaze that no ancient maker could have produced, and a signed confession from the last surviving forger, who handed over a thumb he had kept as a souvenir.

The three pieces were a so-called “Old Warrior,” acquired around 1915–16 and missing its left thumb and right arm; a “Colossal Head,” acquired in 1916, so large that scholars imagined it belonged to a statue some seven metres tall; and a “Big Warrior,” standing over two metres, acquired by 1918. They were purchased through the Met’s Rome-based agent John Marshall and championed inside the museum by the eminent classical curator Gisela Richter, who published them in a 1937 monograph and described them as still resplendent in their original colours. Their scale and apparent state of preservation, rather than triggering suspicion, were read as marks of an extraordinary find.

Doubts circulated for years, but the case broke in 1960–61. The Met’s operating administrator and ceramics specialist Joseph V. Noble, reconstructing how Etruscan black glaze was actually fired, had the statues’ glaze analysed and found it contained manganese — a colourant the ancient Etruscans did not use. The technical evidence pointed unmistakably to modern manufacture. In Rome, the dealer-investigator Harold Parsons tracked down Alfredo Fioravanti, who on 5 January 1961 signed a deposition before the American consul admitting he had helped make the warriors, and produced the Old Warrior’s missing left thumb, which fit the hand exactly. The Met publicly announced the forgeries in February 1961 and removed the statues from view.

The warriors are a case study in how scale and beauty can suppress scrutiny. The forgers solved a hard physical problem — kilns too small to fire a giant figure — by building each statue in sections, deliberately breaking it, firing the fragments, and reassembling it as a “restored” antiquity, turning the very brokenness that should have raised questions into a credential of age. For decades the museum’s confidence, its curator’s investment, and the public’s wonder all reinforced a conclusion that a single glaze test and one honest confession finally overturned.