Art Forgery: The Case of the Lady of Elche by John F. Moffitt (1995, Hardcover)

Key Details
Author:	John F. Moffitt
Language:	English
Publisher:	Univ Pr of Florida
Format:	Hardcover
ISBN-10:	0813013305
ISBN-13:	9780813013305

Size
Height:	9.5 in
Width:	6.5 in
Thickness:	1.2 in
Weight:	26.4 oz

Publisher's Note
Until now, all experts have dated the celebrated Lady of Elche, the beautiful and patriotic symbol of timeless Iberia, to pre-Christian Spain, some time between 500 B.C. and A.D. 150. John F. Moffitt dates it to "ca. 1897."
The Lady, a magnificent sculpted bust of perhaps a princess or priestess, has been regarded as a major work of "ancient" Spanish art ever since it was unearthed near the village of Elche in 1897. Displayed at the Louvre until 1941, the sculpture has resided since then in a place of honor in Madrid's national archaeological museum. To every reputable art historian and archaeologist, European and American alike, it has defined the very essence of Iberian art and the foundations of Spanish art and culture.
Moffitt's detective work will change all that. Pitting twenty years of research (and intuition) against voluminous scholarship and against Spanish pride and nationalism, Moffitt shows that the Lady of Elche is a carefully crafted fake. Further, he offers a detailed, wide-ranging analysis of the means of dissecting any suspected art forgery and discusses what he calls the "collective psychological need for certain kinds of hoaxes."
By his own account, Moffitt became obsessed with this project. Because he assigns the execution of the sculpture to 1896-97, he felt obliged to ground it in the artistic and cultural milieu of that moment, the Symbolist period. He concludes the book with comments on the contributions to early modernism of primitivism and of an artistic technique known as direct carving.