"Stupendous Impersonator"

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, Dec. 17, 1928).

The 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 him about $200 each for works they sold for as much as $100,000. Even these payments were tardy. The hoax was first exposed when Dossena sued one Alfredo Fasoli, antique dealer, for back pay. If Alceo Dossena is not the greatest forger, he certainly is one of the few imitators of antiquities whose work still has real value after the hoax has been exposed. Last week his surplus stock, now frankly under his own name, went on exhibition before a public auction in Manhattan's National Art Galleries.

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.

About 1924 Depression seemed to strike a great number of obscure noble Italian families, churches and monasteries. Dealers were able to offer rich clients the most extraordinary treasures, objects that had evaded the researches of biographers and art students for centuries. With great clamor the Boston Museum paid $100,000 for a Renaissance tomb identified by Italian experts as the work of Mino da Fiesole. The Metropolitan Museum bought an archaic Greek statue. Miss Helen Frick got an angel by "Simone Martini"--the list is endless.

All 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:

"Dossena doesn't copy those artists, he is those artists. He studied Donatello so thoroughly that he projected himself into Donatello's personality. ... He has a multiple personality."

In his foreword to the catalog Dr. Alfred Frankfurter expressed it more delicately: "The personal nature of a child and the artistic talent of a great actor, of a stupendous impersonator."

With the passing centuries the personality of Sculptor Donatello has suffered one curious change. Having finished a statue he is not satisfied with it until he has caused Alceo Dossena to take it out in the back yard, smash it with a hammer, skillfully round the edges of the break with fine abrasives, pickle it in acids and stains, then repair it with fetching crudity.

Dossena's master work was undoubtedly the sculpture of Simone Martini. Simone Martini (1284-1344) was a Sienese, a great painter, a friend of Poet Petrarch, but so far as the world knows he never produced any sculpture. To Alceo Dossena this seemed a great loss. Projecting himself into the personality of Simone Martini, he presented the world with a considerable body of Simone Martini sculpture, of such apparent antiquity and so true to the spirit of his paintings that it was accepted without question by dozens of critics. Two Dossena-Martinis were on view last week.

Since the disclosures of 1928 Alceo Dossena has attempted to confine himself to his own personality, but his modern sculpture seems strangely ineffective. With each of the antique Dossenas on sale last week will go an official document of the Italian Government attesting that it is a genuine fake.

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