Pride and Prejudice
The fake, the art historian and the “blockbuster”
MúzeumCafé 16.
At the end of the 1970s I once asked Bernard Bothmer, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the Brooklyn Museum and one of the greatest historians of Egyptian art, how his predecessor in the museum, John D. Cooney, was able to buy such a large number of faked Coptic sculptures and subscribe to the absurd theory that they represent a special stylistic trend in Coptic art. Bothmer lowered his eyes and answered: “Every curator purchases his own fake.” In the following I would like to relate a parable which, however indirectly, has much do to with the future strategy of the Fine Arts Museum. Correctly identifying the intention of its maker, John D. Cooney defined the Brooklyn carving, which was without any late antique iconographic parallel, as the depiction of the paralytic healed by Jesus as recounted in the Gospels (Matthew 9, 1-8 or Luke 5, 17-26). The healed cripple lifting his bed on his back was made in a forgery workshop operating in Egypt. Their products appearing between 1958 and 1963 were purchased by European and American art dealers and ended up in leading museums and respectable private collections. A small number of items were created by restoring and/or recarving more or less damaged original works from Oxyrhynchus in Lower Egypt. The majority were carved from large, undecorated antique ashlars keeping at least one original side. Today it is not difficult to recognize that the workshop’s products were created for financial gain, their content was absurd and they are forgeries of low quality in terms of workmanship. Yet, it must be realized that all of them are connected with a clearly outlined art historical perspective, which provided a perfect framework for the happy meeting of a curator’s scholarly work with the forger. The roots of the perspective in question go back to excavations undertaken in Egypt in 1890. While exploring a 4th-century A.D. Christian chapel at Ahnas, in the ancient Herakleopolis Magna, Edouard Naville found several figurative carvings with a theme from classical mythology, which he incorrectly regarded as the original ornaments of the chapel, whereas they belonged to a former building or buildings above whose ruins the chapel stood. This elementary archaeological error led to a long-lasting assumption about Coptic art according to which, unlike in other regions of Early Christian art, the churches of Egyptian Early Christians were decorated by figural sculptures with purely pagan themes. Early 20th-century writings about Coptic art explained this phenomenon by the ancient Copts considering the pagan mythological scenes as Christianised symbols of pharaonic concepts. Josef Strzrygowski explained the depiction of mythological figures with reference to a Christian Coptic taste for “obscene nudity”. This absurd idea was later included in Charles Rufus Morey’s influential “Early Christian Art”. This theory paradoxically was joined by a second. It assumed that Coptic art did not originate in Egyptian Hellenistic-Roman art but emerged from the milieu of the Coptic church and the Egyptian peasantry. In the inter-war period the latter postulate, augmented with backprojecting the notion of ‘national art’ to Egyptian Early Christian art, eventually ran into the cul-de-sac of defining Coptic art as folk art. This latter definition enabled the relics of Coptic art to be scientifically accepted without any quality criteria, as exemplified by the reception of the Brooklyn and other forgeries. The products of the forgery workshop seemed to provide direct evidence for the concept according to which in the 4th century A.D. Coptic Christians gave a Christian character to pagan iconographic types by adding the sign of the cross, and even created so far unknown iconographic types on the basis of the Bible. The style created by the forgers imitating Oxyrhynchus carvings from the 4th century A.D. argued for the assumption which claimed that, inspired by the “people’s sub-conscious”, Coptic artists consciously turned away from the Alexandrian Hellenistic traditions and created stylised works with simplified forms and expressive symbols. The workshop’s products featured in largest numbers young men’s tomb stelae, aimed to present the Christianization of a pagan stela type which could be connected to Oxyrhynchus. The workshop also undertook the ambitious Christianization of the Hellenistic cavetto cornice, a characteristic element of Egyptian late antique architecture, primarily of elite tomb architecture. An orans was sometimes added or was combined with the aforementioned forged tomb stela type and was made by recarving similar antique cavetto cornices or their fragments. Many experts tend to forget that exhibitions, both permanent and temporary, are the products of not only professional discourse but also interaction with the period and the general public. The case of the Coptic forgeries warns, however, that not only the general public but also the art historian is a product of his/her time. While there may be no doubt that a museum’s exhibitions should ideally be based on research carried out mainly whitin its own walls, we have to realize that the scholar’s enemy is not the “blockbuster”. It is the bias of his/her time and his/her proud prejudices.