Alceo Dossena

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Alceo Dossena (born October 9, 1878 in Cremona , † October 11, 1937 in Rome ) was an Italian sculptor .

Life

Dossena, a stone mason from Rome, created numerous sculptures in marble , wood or terracotta in the style of Roman and Greek antiquity , Gothic and Renaissance between 1918 and 1928 , which were of such high quality that they were considered masterpieces of European sculpture and as Originals by the most important sculptors were viewed. Numerous works by Dossena were given certificates of authenticity by art experts and sold to museums, such as a Madonna and Child attributed to Niccolò Pisano and a figure of Athena to the Cleveland Museum of Art and a Greek goddess to the Metropolitan Museum in New York . A sculpture by Simone Martinis , of which no sculpture was known until then, was considered a particular rarity .

The special market situation in the post-war and inflationary years encouraged a flight to material assets and thus also the willingness to buy works of art. The sudden appearance of previously unknown masterpieces aroused u. a. therefore little suspicion, because in those years numerous royal houses, state collections and private art collectors were forced to sell parts of their collections for economic reasons. Since the works were of particular quality and yet unknown, it was assumed that they had come from the Vatican's holdings on the market.

When in 1928 a marble tomb, which Dossena had created and sold for 25,000 lire, was resold by the dealer Romano Palazzi as a work of Mino da Fiesoles to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for almost six million lire , but the dealer Dossena received financial help afterwards Refused to die of his wife, he initiated a sensational lawsuit against Palazzi and the agent Alfredo Fasoli for fraud, which ultimately petered out, but triggered an art scandal. Dossena was not charged because he only worked in the style of bygone eras and had never passed off his works himself as originals by other masters, so in the strict sense was not an art forger . He had not made copies, but reproductions in the spirit of the respective artistic epochs from the Archaic to the Renaissance.

Before the scandal, numerous art experts praised the sculptures as original masterpieces of high standing and issued certificates of authenticity, but now they emphasized their allegedly low level, gross errors or the obviousness of crude forgeries - they could not restore their reputation as experts. In 1930 Hans Cürlis, director of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Research, shot the film The Sculptor Alceo Dossena as part of the film cycle Schaffendeehand . In 1937 Dossena died in a Roman hospital for the poor.

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personal data
SURNAME Dossena, Alceo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Cremona
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1937
Place of death Rome