Follow the snake goddess to find a famous forger
The Today programme would call her iconic, but since she is a 16.1cm gold and ivory (‘chryselephantine’) statuette, it would not be saying much. She stands there, erect, shoulders back, thrusting forward impressive bare breasts (one nipple the tip of a golden nail), both hands holding snakes that, twined round her arms, stretch outwards from her, tongues flickering. The best-known of all the ancient Cretan snake goddesses, she has graced the covers of, and been reproduced in, a thousand books.
It is her face that has caught the imagination. With her pouting lips and deep-set eyes, she has been hailed as ‘charmingly serene’, ‘radiant’, ‘demure’, ‘expressive of individuality’ and ‘arresting’. ‘Rendered with a freedom and naturalness that are exceptional’ she ‘shows all the distinguishing features of Cretan art at its best’ and is a ‘unique’ masterpiece.
For Lacey D. Caskey, curator of the Classical Department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, her acquisition was the ‘event of the year’ (the year was 1914). For Sir Arthur Evans, the man who excavated Knossos from 1900–1944, she was yet another piece in a jigsaw that would fulfil all his fantasies about the ancient civilisation he was to call Minoan Crete (after its legendary King Minos).
She is a fake. So are most of the other Cretan snake goddesses, not to mention the ivory Boy-gods associated by Evans with them (their ivory is no more than 500 years old). In his Mysteries of the Snake Goddess, the American archaeologist and art historian Kenneth Lapatin (associate curator at the Getty) reveals all in an investigation of which Inspector Morse would have been proud.
The starting point is that no one in 1914 had the remotest idea where the snake goddess had been found. Indeed, the Boston curator admitted as much. Evans did not know either, but assumed it came from a site where material resembling it had been discovered in 1902–03. Caskey’s successor at the Museum of Fine Arts claimed that a Boston lady had picked it up from a Cretan immigrant whom she had met on board the ship on which she was travelling home. Not only could the lady (in someone else’s account a man) not be found, but not a single ship sailed from Piraeus to Boston in 1913 or 1914. It emerges, then, that not only was the snake goddess’s findspot unknown, so too was its history.
At one level, none of this was surprising. The finds at Knossos were not just enormously romantic in themselves, but were also actively romanticised by Evans in line with current theories of the day about matriarchal societies and Mother Goddesses. The snakes added a yet further fashionable touch. Forgers flourish under such conditions, and they were quick to provide punters with what they wanted. The punters, meanwhile, did not always fall over themselves to inquire about findspots; nor, more culpably, did museums, swept away by Minoamania.
Evans himself was well aware of the problem. Sir Leonard Woolley, excavator of Ur in Mesopotamia, recalls accompanying him to the home of a forger betrayed to the police by his dying accomplice. Everything that was needed to construct a snake goddess was there — ivory, gold, acids baths to give the ageing effect, and so on. Woolley’s account is fuzzy, but there is no doubt about the essential truth of his story, datable to 1923–24. Further, he documents that the forgers’ day-time job was working under the Swiss artists and restorers Émile Gilliéron and his son, who advised Evans on the restoration of the famous Knossos frescoes. They had obviously been enthusiastic pupils.
Lapatin’s investigations of the archives of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, combined with the work of a retired policeman coincidentally investigating the death in 1925 of the travelling archaeologist Richard Seager, revealed it was in fact Seager (known to and admired by Evans) who had brought the Boston snake goddess to the USA in 1914. He had passed it on to the director of the American School in Athens Bert Hodge Hill, and it was he who, as a favour to Seager, offered it to Boston. Neither Hill nor Seager wanted to be associated with the transaction.
But where did Seager get it? A letter from Seager to Hill written on 29 June 1914 reveals that he got it on the quiet from one ‘Mr Jones’ (no relation). Since no such archaeologist was at work in Greece at the time, it was clearly a pseudonym. But whose? Lapatin reckons he knows: it was the pseudonym of Evans’s restorer Émile Gilliéron. Gilliéron knew Seager, having once worked with him; and crucially, Georg Karo, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens, revealed in his memoirs that in 1914 Gilliéron had offered him another snake goddess — an equally egregious fake. Find a chryselephantine snake goddess or similar stone statuette, and Gilliéron was at the end of it. And of much else too.
But that raises a major question: how do we know they are fakes in the first place? Could not Gilliéron simply have been an intermediary in a rather nasty underground trade in the real thing? In the case of the Boston snake goddess, Lapatin provides damning evidence. Art historians in 1914 were already remarking on the unique deep-set eyes (unknown till the 4th century BC). Further examination reveals a feature not known till the 2nd century AD: the drill holes for the pupil of the right eye have a second drill hole for the inner canthus (corner of the eye). The killer blow, however, is that the left-hand-side of the face is sheared away — yet the face is still in the middle of the head. As Lapatin points out, it is the face that buyers wanted. In the fakes, it is always the face that ‘survives’.
Lapatin fingers Gilliéron as a wholesale forger, but does admit that the goddesses may conceivably be pastiches of originals, tarted up to appeal to contemporary tastes. But he is doubtful. What is clear is that the naive Evans, who was not party to any of this, was thrilled to find his views about the Boston snake goddess so instantly confirmed by similar amazing finds. Gilliéron had his master’s and the world’s tastes to a T.
Lapatin concludes: these fakes ‘provide a canvas on which archaeologists and curators, looters and smugglers, dealers and forgers, art-patrons and museum-goers... have painted their preconceptions, desires and preoccupations for an idealised past’. As such, this very thrilling detective story is a mustread for all budding archaeologists and art historians — indeed, everyone with a ‘vision’ of the sort that Evans so innocently (in my view) but gullibly harboured.
Which prompts another mystery. Lapatin is a first-rate scholar. His book was published in 2002. It has been reviewed in three scholarly journals, and that is all. Coincidence? Or does someone out there feel this is not the sort of thing we should be told about?
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