Word: dossena
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Five years ago directors of a dozen European museums as well as the Metropolitan, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Cleveland Museum of Art and Collectors Helen Clay Frick and William Randolph Hearst discovered that they were all supplied with the works of Sculptor Alceo Dossena in his varying moods. They knew them under a variety of other names and the smell the story aroused was not sweet (TIME...
...Dossena sculptures had been sold as original antiques by the great Renaissance artists: Donatello, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, Niccola Pisano, etc., etc. Newspapers, promptly dubbed him "world's greatest forger," and before the excitement was over the notorious Elia Volpi and several other over-shrewd dealers found themselves fined, exposed, and once more in possession of carloads of spurious sculpture. Sculptor Dossena remained within the law. He never sold his work direct to museum or collector, never, so far as investigators could discover, pretended that they were anything but his own work. Nor did he make money. Dealers paid...
...Alceo Dossena had a good apprenticeship for his profession. He was born in 1878 in Cremona, hometown of the great Violin Maker Stradivari, and apprenticed to a marble mason. With his master he worked for years restoring the balustrades and ornaments of local churches in Cremona, Piacenza, Parma-restorations that not only copied the details but imitated the patina of nearby originals. Soon he was restoring not only marble but bronze, terra cotta and wood...
After the armistice, when Alceo Dossena took off his fighting tunic he was no longer satisfied with repairing other people's antiques. He had handled and studied the work of so many great masters, had learned so many secrets of coloring, polishing and aging stone, that he felt quite capable of doing a little original work of his own. Sculptor Dossena set up shop in a little villa outside Florence, then in one outside Rome. He locked the doors of both to strangers...
...these were the work of Alceo Dossena. His defenders make one important point. Dossena never actually copied any known work by the men he was imitating. To the extent that an elaborate parody is a work of art, Alceo Dossena was an original artist. At the National Galleries last week President Van Baarn explained...