Inveterate Scammers: Top 5 Old Master Forgers — from Michelangelo to “the Moriarty of Fakers”

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Before becoming an honoured artist himself, the Italian painter and sculptor made copies. At that time, ancient Roman marble sculptures were highly valued, and, according to the historian Paolo Giovio, Michelangelo was involved in a story with the falsification of such a sculpture.
In 1496, he created a marble statue, Sleeping Cupid, and tried to give it an aged look by burying it in the ground. An antiques dealer named Baldassarre del Milanese presented Michelangelo’s "Ancient Roman" sculpture to the attention of Cardinal Rafaele Riario, a great admirer of such works of art. He gladly acquired it, but after a while he returned the sculpture, having learned about its true origin.

It would seem that the case should have ended in scandal at best, and punishment for Michelangelo at worst. But his talent rescued him from the trouble, because while they saw into the "ancient" sculpture, his author’s work, Pietà, which adorned St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, became so popular that the cardinal wanted to regain the ill-fated Cupid. Although he soon resold it, not as a Roman antique however, but as a work of the most popular sculptor in the Italian capital at that time.

Various biographers of Michelangelo disagree on whether he deliberately went for a deception. Some of them prefer to believe that the authorship of the criminal design belonged to a dealer of Roman antiquities, while others assume that the sculptor was driven by excitement: he wanted to check whether his skill was enough to mislead an experienced collector. Be that as it may, the deceived Cardinal Riario wasn’t angry with Michelangelo, he even ordered him two more works after all the events.

Hans van Meegeren

Speaking about the forgers of the old masterpieces, we can’t omit the Vermeer's compatriot, who dared to embark on a brave adventure — to reveal to the world as many as seven previously unknown masterpieces of the "authorship" of the painter from Delft. Henrikus van Meegeren was not a particularly gifted artist who tried to build a career creating paintings in the style of old artists like Rembrandt at the beginning of the last century. And although he had some fans among the Dutch nobility, art critics were very sceptical about the work of the unfortunate imitator. Meegeren even conceived an insidious plan of revenge on the art critic Abraham Bredius, who rejected him. He decided to prank his sworn enemy by creating a brilliant counterfeit as if by the recognized artist Vermeer. And when he cannot distinguish his work from the original, Meegeren will disgrace him by announcing his authorship of the pictorial masterpiece. He got hold of 17th century canvas and paints and dared to paint a picture on a religious theme — there were virtually no such subjects among the famous works by Vermeer.

The venture was a success: Christ in Emmaus was recognized as an original by Vermeer and made a splash in the art world. That same Bredius was in such a hurry to become the discoverer of the Vermeer’s unknown masterpieces that he did not pay attention to either the dubious provenance of the picture, or to the poor correspondence of Meegeren’s artistic skills to the skill of the renowned painter.
And when the forger managed to bail out a huge amount of money for his work at that time, he could not follow his original plan and succumbed to the temptation to continue creating new hitherto unknown works by Vermeer.

He managed to paint six more such canvases, until he was let down by the connection with the Nazis. One of the buyers of Meegeren’s counterfeit Christ and the Sinner painting was Hermann Goering. In 1945, an investigation into the origin of the canvas in the hiding places of the SS Obergruppenfuehrer led to the arrest of the artist, who faced the death penalty for collaborating with the Nazis. To avoid it, Meegeren admitted that he himself painted all the "newly discovered" paintings by Vermeer. He was eventually found guilty of fraud and sentenced to one year in prison, but just a month later he died of a heart attack.

It is noteworthy that thanks to his scam, the negligent artist still managed to enter the history of world painting. And his first and most famous work à la Vermeer is still exhibited in one of the largest art galleries in the Netherlands, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. In this whole story, only one thing remains unclear: how badly one must want to find new Vermeer’s masterpieces to believe in his authorship; after all, Meegeren’s canvases, no matter how old they seemed, are frankly rough, clumsy. Apparently, vanity and greed were the main accomplices of the most famous forger of the twentieth century.

Eric Hebborn

The name of the British artist and art dealer is not as well known as his Dutch counterpart, although he was far more prolific and talented than Meegeren.

In his autobiography, Hebborn confessed to creating more than a thousand forgeries, only a few of which were exposed, and the rest can still be kept in the best museums in the world as originals.

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the British School in Rome, he has acquired many useful skills while working as a restorer. Like Meegeren, he was disappointed and angered that in the 1960s his own realistic paintings were not as popular as the avant-garde

Avant-garde is how modern art critics refer the general trend of new artistic directions that arose in world art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A very thin line separates it from the concept of “modernism”. Read more

works of his more fortunate contemporaries. And he began to take revenge on connoisseurs of painting, creating flawless forgeries of the old artists.

Hebborn was extremely careful and even elegant. He never sold his fakes to those who did not understand art and could not determine the authenticity of the painting. Thus, he gave the experts the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they were buying a fake or an original, and to define the price they were willing to pay.
He claimed: "There is nothing criminal in making a picture in whatever style you choose, and there is nothing criminal in asking an expert what he thinks of it." For this reason, after the exposure, none of the victims of the deception never sued him. Moreover, the confrontation with Hebborn could lead to disastrous consequences for the largest auction houses, which resold his work as original, and some museums still refuse to admit that they have fakes of his authorship, despite the direct statements of the fraudster. He claimed responsibility for the falsification of the works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Rubens, Giovanni Piranesi, Anthony van Dyck, Camille Corot and other old artists.

Hebborn used real paper and pigments from the era for his fakes, and his drawing skills were so good that they could not reveal him for a very long time. But in 1978, the curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC Konrad Oberhuber noticed that two drawings by different painters were made in the same art style and on the same type of paper. According to Hebborn, within 10 years after being exposed, he made and successfully sold another 500 forgeries of drawings by the old artists. Moreover, some art dealers even asked him to "find" certain drawings by old artists, which he forged and then sold to them. "I just don’t think you’ll find an honest man to be a dealer," Hebborn said in the 1991 BBC documentary, Portrait of a Master Forger.

On 8 January 1996, Hebborn was found unconscious on the Roman street, where he had lived for the past 30 years. He died as a result of a severe skull injury, but his death was formally investigated and the cause of the injury was not established. Many believed he had been killed by the Italian mafia, with whom he might have collaborated. According to The Daily Mail newspaper, the death of Hebborn was the revenge of some collector he deceived. According to some reports, he even received threats from one art dealer and was afraid of him. A few weeks before his death, the last book, The Art Forger’s Handbook, was published with detailed instructions for creating art in the manner of European classics. Hebborn believed that he used the same techniques as the painters of the past, so this publication is also suitable for studying the style of the old artists.

Shaun Greenhalgh

The British fraudster, sentenced to 4 years and 8 months in 2007 for trying to sell an "ancient" Assyrian artifact, worked with his family. Greenhalgh ran a fraudulent art deal with his elderly parents. Like the previous heroes, he thus began to take revenge on the art community for not recognizing his artistic talent. The family came up with an ingenious scheme to exploit weaknesses in auction catalogues. So, they acquired a catalogue describing the lots of the 1892 auction in Silverton Park, Devon. Among them were "eight Egyptian figures of stunning translucent alabaster". This vague description allowed Shaun Greenhalgh to create the Princess Amarna statue. In 2003, it was acquired by the Bolton Museum for almost 440 thousand pounds, in spite of preliminary consultation with experts from the British Museum and the auction house Christie’s.

The success of the family counterfeits manufacture and sale business was largely due to George, Shaun’s father. An elderly gentleman in a wheelchair made a trustworthy impression on customers. When he reported that the Amarna Princess was bought by his grandfather at an auction in Silverton Park a hundred years ago, experts readily believed that the statue was one of those eight Egyptian figures over three thousand years old from the description in the old catalogue. Under this scheme, the Greenhalgh family has managed to earn more than £ 800,000 over 17 years by selling at least 120 fakes. And according to the investigation, more than a hundred forgeries may still be kept in collections of museums and private collections around the world as original works of art. Among those revealed are fakes of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Paul Gauguin, paintings and drawings by artists Otto Dix, Lawrence Lowry, Thomas Moran and others.

The Greenhalghs failed with cuneiform. Representatives of the Bonhams auction house turned to experts at the British Museum to verify the authenticity of the Shaun’s bas-reliefs "from the palace of an ancient Assyrian king". But experts discovered errors in the writing of the cuneiform text and turned to the Department of Art and Antiquities of Scotland Yard. A year and a half later, the scammers' family was arrested. Shaun’s elderly parents received suspended sentences, and he served almost five years and was released in 2011.
Upon his release from prison, Greenhalgh not only wrote an autobiography, but also received the Critics' Award for Best Art Book in 2018. And in October 2019, he appeared in Made in Bolton, a short documentary series in which he showed the process of creating four "ancient" works of art using traditional materials and methods.

Lino Frongia

The author of the forgeries that caused the loudest scandal on the market of old artists in the last 70 years (since Meegeren who made bold to imitate Vermeer’s legacy) has not been reliably established. But in the focus of the investigation on several paintings of dubious origin, the name of the Italian Lino Frongia appears.
The hunt for "the Moriarty of Fakers", as the press nicknamed the author of artful forgeries of paintings by Parmigianino, Hals, El Greco and others, began back in 2015. Then the French police withdrew Venus painting allegedly painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder from the exhibition in the French Aix-en-Provence. In 2013, the Prince of Liechtenstein paid about 7 million euros for it. Later examination showed that this work was a modern forgery.

A similar situation arose with a portrait of a man allegedly by Franz Hals, which was sold at Sotheby’s for $ 11 million. After experts recognized it as a fake, the auction house returned the entire amount to the buyer. A similar fate awaited Francesco Parmigianino’s painting of St. Jerome, sold in 2012 at the Sotheby’s New York auction. Six years later, laboratory tests discovered modern pigments in the paint layer and the auction house had to compensate the buyer for the full cost of the painting again.

In September 2019, a French court issued an arrest warrant for Italian artist Lino Frongia. He was arrested but released on bail and is still at large. Very little is known about him: he was born in 1958 in Montecchio and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. His own work, eerie modernist paintings, is not particularly popular with collectors: the most expensive of them was auctioned for only 15 thousand euros. But he achieved great skill in imitating the works of the old artists.

Long before the scandal broke out, curator Vittorio Sgarbi, former deputy secretary of the Italian Ministry of Culture, admired that his friend Frongia had painted Christ so skilfully that a certain Giuliano Ruffini was able to sell the painting to the Correggio Foundation under the guise of the original work of Antonio Correggio. But the artist refutes this information, although he admits that among his works, there are copies of the works of old artists and a painting with Christ in the style of Correggio among them. He stated that he never sold his copies under the guise of real works.

However, there is a bad moment with a suspicious canvas in his biography, although not related to its sale. In 2018, Frongia loaned an El Greco painting from his collection for an exhibition in Treviso. But the police arrested the image of St. Francis upon suspicion of a forgery. Despite the fact that the French court refused to return the painting (in the course of the investigation it was transported to Paris), Frongia continued to claim that it was the real masterpiece by El Greco. Vittorio Sgarbi thought the same, which, however, did not prevent him from calling his friend "the greatest living old artist".

The second suspect in this high-profile case was the collector Giuliano Ruffini, who facilitated the way to the market for all the scandalous fakes. He is also still at large, despite a warrant issued by the Supreme Court of Rome. Allegedly, this is due to an unfinished investigation, but it looks like the process is being hampered by some influential outside forces. Given the location, the Italian mafia comes to mind, but even without its participation, too large amounts of money and the reputation of many people are involved: dealers, auction houses representatives, who participated in the large-scale financial fraud.

In order to compensate somehow for the reputation losses due to a series of returns of the sold fakes, Sotheby’s had to buy the American Orion Analytical laboratory, the one that established the dishonest origin of the paintings sold as works by Parmigianino and Hals.

In just one year, the laboratory’s experts analysed works that cost more than one hundred million dollars.

In addition, they are responsible for keeping and maintaining the auction house lots in good condition. But this step is unlikely to change the situation with counterfeit works of art much in the modern art market, as, according to some experts, they make up half of the total number of sold and bought works by old artists.