The art of re-creation: terracotta statuettes and their copies. About one ‘Tanagra’ from the Princes Czartoryski Museum
The art of re-creation: terracotta statuettes and their copies. About one ‘Tanagra’ from the Princes Czartoryski Museum

Summary/Abstract: Terracotta figurines of graceful young women discovered in the necropolis at Tanagra and found in many other places in the ancient world attracted great interest among collectors from the 1870s onwards. The simplicity of the processes used to facilitate large-scale production of clay products in the ancient world was exploited by antiquities dealers, who copied them in order to bring significant numbers of forgeries and pastiches onto the market, many of which are pieces now found in many museum collections. Conservation work, backed up by chemical testing, is currently underway to establish the authenticity of such statuettes and to create, from confirmed forgeries, simulations of the original appearance of the true antique with its full polychromy.

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