Welcome to the South Florida Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America
Come join us at our monthly meetings held on the first Thursday of each month or attend one of our AIA sponsored lectures. Activities include discussions, videos, field trips, and mini-conferences offering the presentation of papers concerning the latest reseach being conducted in southern Florida. You may contact us at aiasfl@gmail.com or if you would like additional details please contact Rudolph Pascucci, AIASFL Coordinator at rpascucci@pbmnh.org
The
South Florida Chapter of the
Archaeological Institute of America
Archaeology and Anthropology
Field trips
2011-12 Lecture Series
Etruscan Forgeries
The Arts of profit and Deceit
Presented by Dr. Richard de Puma
Emeritus Professor, Classical Arts and Archaeology
University of Iowa
Friday, September 23rd at 7pm
Location: Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Campus, 777 Glades Rd., Rm. GCN 102
Forgeries of Etruscan art have been made from at least as early as the 15th century. The period between about 1850 and 1950 saw a remarkable number of Etruscan forgeries being produced…and accepted as authentic for 75 to 100 years after their creation. Questions posed include: Why is Etruscan art especially vulnerable to forgery? What are the motives for creating forgeries? Why can some—but not all—forgeries be detected? The main focus of the lecture, however, is on a pair of unpublished terracottas collected by a major American museum in 1912 and long believed to be Etruscan works from ca. 100 B.C. The audience is introduced to these sculptures in a completely objective manner that places them in the broader context of Etruscan funerary sculpture. This portion of the talk illustrates well the methods by which archaeologists and art historians approach works deprived of their archaeological context. Later, after examining a series of closely related sculptures in several European museums, the audience is asked to “vote” informally on whether one, both, or neither of the sculptures—and, by implication, those in Europe too—is/are authentic. Finally, the results of recent thermoluminescence tests provide the answer.
Richard De Puma is the F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classical Art and Archaeology at the School of Art and Art History, University of Iowa, where he taught for more than thirty years. He earned his B.A. at Swarthmore College, and holds the M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr. He is on the advisory boards of several scholarly publications and only recently resigned the position of General Editor of the University of Wisconsin Press' Studies in Classics series after more than a decade of service. In addition, he is a Research Associate at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and an elected member of both the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, and the National Institute of Etruscan and Italic Studies in Florence. Most recently, he was Senior Curatorial Consultant for the exhibition "Art in Roman Life: Villa to Grave" at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. He is the author of nine books on various aspects of Etruscan and Roman art and archaeology, and has published more than fifty articles and book reviews in numerous scholarly journals here and in Europe. His third book on Etruscan engraved mirrors was published in Rome in December, 2005, and he is currently completing the exhibition catalogue for "Art in Roman Life" and another book on Etruscan forgeries. For many years he was on the Advisory Board of the American Journal of Archaeology and has been a long-time lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America. He has excavated in Italy, Turkey and India, and most recently has co-directed excavations at Crustumerium, an ancient Latin city just north of Rome. He is also Senior Curatorial Advisor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There he is collaborating on the major permanent reinstallation of the Etruscan and Roman galleries, scheduled to open in April 2007, as well as on two guidebooks to the new exhibitions.
See Richard de Puma's work in the American Journal of Archaeology:
For
more information, please contact:
Rudolph F. Pascucci
Coordinator, AIA-South Florida
rpascucci@pbmnh.org
Dr. Joseph Tainter
