HILARIOUS! GERMAN ART AND FORGERY-GIACOMETTI

Giacommeti’s Walking Man

A court case has been brought against a German ring who stand accused of knowingly attempting to put a forged Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture on the market.

A 67-year-old assessor named Wolf G., and a 60-year-old art dealer named Hans K., have been accused of fraud and falsification of documents. Wolf. G’s ex-wife Ulrike G., a 63-year-old lawyer and her 92-year-old mother have been accused as accomplices.

According to court documents Wolf. G acquired a fake Giacometti sculpture in 2008 in a barter deal with a man identified as Lothar Se., who was a member of criminal gang surrounding the Dutch Giacometti forger Robert Driessen.

Driessen and his gang are estimated to have made €8 million ($8.9 million) selling forgeries until they were apprehended in 2011. Police discovered over 1,000 bronze Giacometti forgeries in the gang’s warehouse. The authorities melted down the sculptures, but as the current court case shows, many are still on the market.

In March 2009 Wolf G. unsuccessfully attempted to consign the fakeWalking Man sculpture to a Swiss auction house, asking CHF 5 million ($5.3 million) for it. A Giacometti expert identified the sculpture as a copy and it was sent back.

Wolf G. and art dealer Hans. K subsequently attempted to sell the sculpture to a private collector for €350,000 ($390,000), but the deal collapsed after the collector was unable to secure a loan.

Several months later the forgery was offered to Sotheby’s, Frankfurt where it was rejected once again.

Following a third unsuccessful sale attempt, Lothar Se. took back the forgery and was arrested after trying to sell the work to an undercover detective for €1.5 million ($1.6 million). The subsequent investigation led detectives to Wolf G., Hans K. and Ulrike G.

The case is already being compared to the German master art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi, who was released from prison in January.

https://news.artnet.com/in-brief/giacometti-forgery-fraud-court-2



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What May Be Oldest American Artwork Discovered By Accident In Alaska

Archaeologists have discovered what may well be the oldest artifact ever found in North America. The 12,300 year-old bone pendant was found by accident by experts digging at a site in the Tanana Basin area in Alaska, where they were looking for a group of animal hide tents.

“It made my heart stop when I saw [the pendant],” said Dr. Ben Potter, leader of the excavation project. “Art serves as a way to fix social boundaries. These could be a way to communicate. They could be the first evidence we have for social boundary maintenance in high-latitude North America,” he added.

The cross hatched pendant was found within the outlines of an animal hide tent, which suggests that a group of people used the area as a camp.

The archaeologists found further bone fragments, including a bear jawbone with a canine removed. They believe that the fragments were collected to make other items of jewelry.

Despite being truly ancient, the bone pendant is not the oldest artifact ever discovered. That honor belongs to a staggering 42,000 year-old series of paintings in the Caves of Nerja, near Malaga, Spain.

The Alaskan pendant is the latest in a series of astonishing archaeological discoveries that are changing the way we understand the lives, social customs, and artistic endeavors of ancient civilizations

https://news.artnet.com/in-brief/oldest-american-artwork-alaska-298104

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The SHIPS of MELENCOLIA-Part 4

This ship is located  180 degrees up from the nails that are located on the ground in front of the Melencolia. It is “traveling” in the same direction as the other ships we’ve found so far and is on the right side of the print hidden in Melencolia’s dress, which is indicating the past.

Once again it is a carrack such as we’ve seen before

The red arrow is pointing to the front hull with the distinctive side covering only partially displayed.

The yellow arrow is pointing to the bottom of the ship.

How many more ships will we find? 

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The SHIPS of MELENCOLIA-Part 3

We have already seen in Part two that there is a ship hidden in the folds of the putto’s dress above.

But what comes as a surprise, but actually shouldn’t as the data is analyzed, is that THERE’S ANOTHER SHIP hidden in the folds of the putto, Margret’s dress:

The red oval is outlining the first ship, which is smaller, that was found in the putto Margret’s dress. The blue box encompasses the hull of the carrack that is found directly below the first smaller ship, with the orange arrow basically indicating the directional focus of this carrack’s hull. The green arrow is pouting to the distinctive cross hull  design of the carrack that we saw before.

The yellow box with the big yellow arrow is pointing to at least two Jewish stars, six pointed. The compass on the top of the calipers Melencolia holds indicates the direction that these two ships are heading for-again EAST, from whence the Duerer family ancestors came from.

So what is really going on here?

We need to remember that Margret was a TWIN,the second of the two girl twins born Jan 20, 1476, and that the first twin girl was named Agnes I.  According to the Nuremberg death registries, Agnes died in childhood, which is why a later girl child born was called Agnes II.

Albrecht could never leave out a reference to his other twin sister, Agnes or the fact that these two siblings were twins. So he puts the BIG ship directly below the small ship, indicating that Margret had lived into adulthood, dying during the creation of this composition but also giving reference to Agnes I.

The two Jewish stars above the bigger ship and on the side of the smaller ship, are indications that his twin sisters were crypto-Jews, as was the whole family.

Where will we find the next ship?

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The SHIPS of MELENCOLIA-Part 2

As previously  reported in the first article about the mysterious ships that are encoded in Melencolia which you see again here, a Portuguese or Spanish medieval carrackthere are more ships that have been found on the right side of the composition, delineated by the putto, who represents the co-artist Margret.

As the Duerer Cipher reveals, anything on the right side of a “two storied” composition indicates something from the past. Margret and Albrecht were both working on this print as a tribute to their mother, Barbara, who they knew had started to die in 1513.  Then suddenly, Margret died closely after her mother, sometime between May 16, 1514 and August 24, 1514, according to the death registries published by the Nuremberg St. Lorenze church.

As discovered by P. Weber in 1900, the ENTIRE theory that Der Reuter, the 1514 St. Jerome in the Study and Melencolia COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PRODUCED AS PART OF A TRILOGY, the “Meisterstiches, ” as they still are called today, since the records of Anton Tucher’s cashbook, the Losunger, or President of the Nuremberg city government (the City Council) PROVE that Tucher purchased from Albrecht on October 13, 1515, three “St. Jerome’s” and FOUR Melencolia prints as presents for friends in Rome”, has been totally ignored. Otherwise, Albrecht GAVE these two paired prints, The St Jerome and Melencolia, without Der Reuter, to very highly placed courtiers to get his pension back when he went to Antwerp to regain the pension he had lost upon the death of Emperor Maximilian in 1519.

Der Reuter was made in 1513, so it never made any sense that Melencolia might have been “numbered” as  1. These three prints were never interconnected and the perpetuation of this myth for another 114 years after a “recognized, at the time, Duerer expert” blew the theory apart, but is perpetuated in ALL art history classes today, is an ridiculous, proving that academia merely repeats over and over the inaccurate research about Albrecht Duerer. But of course, it’s always about the Italian Renaissance artists, so why should they care?  THEY DON’T.   But let’s get back to the second ship in Melencolia. Here is the image of the second ship in Melencolia, and without surprise, It is encoded in the folds of the drapery of the putto, Margret, on the right side of her dress:

What you see in this image are a number of symbols.  The ship itself is within the bounds of the red oval with the yellow arrow pointing to the flag flying from it’s masthead. the flag appears encoded but we haven’t figured that out yet, please feel free to try to do so. The purple arrow points to the what appears to be the masthead, and it appears to be a bird of some sort, a very large bird. The object that is circled in the blue oval with the orange arrow pointing to it is a telescope, another telescope.  Both the position of the ship and the directional clue of the telescope almost mirrors the direction that the first ship found is traveling towards, and that would be EAST, towards the past.   How many more ships will we find?

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The SHIPS of MELENCOLIA-Part 1

There are so many new symbols and encodings that have been found recently in Melencolia, it is difficult to decide which ones to present first, so we have chosen to start with the ships since we have already revealed the fact that this composition contains compasses indicating places to which to sail.

The first ship found is actually embedded in a triple encoded symbol, the figure with eyes and a crown and a shoulder embedded in one of the whitest of melancholia’s dress drapery, which you see here

As you can see towards the right, there is a figure staring out at all of us with two eyes, wearing a crown, whose right shoulder is drawn with a dark line that comes down to the hem of Melencolia’s dress.

What astonished us was to find that this figure was actually a triple encoded symbol and we found the first sailing ship that is embedded in this composition.  It is the largest of the sailing ships found to date.

This ship is a carrack. Carracks were ocean-going ships: large enough to be stable in heavy seas, and roomy enough to carry provisions for long voyages. They were the ships in which the Portuguese and the Spanish explored the world in the 15th and 16th centuries, the exact times that Duerer and his sister would have known these ships. In Portuguese this type was called a nau, while in Spanish it is called a carraca or nao. In French it was called a caraque or nef. Columbus sailed in a carrack.

The red oval circle outlines the hull of the ship.

The blue rectangle outlines the rectangular upper part of the ship that typically surrounded the hull, pointed to by the yellow arrow

The two orange arrows are outlining the forward mast where the green arrow is pointing to the flag flying on this mast.

The yellow box outlines a large figure that is sitting in the ship.

Since we have learned from the Duerer Cipher that compositions which are basically separated in half, please see my article on the Eustachium where this is clearly indicated, in this case  the putto sitting on the millstone dissects the composition and thus  two stories are being told.  Since this ship is embedded on the right side of the composition, we know this ship is sailing towards the “past.” Based upon the compasses already found and reported, this ship is sailing towards Eastern Europe.

How many more ships will we find in Melencolia?

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MIRACLES? This is One Crazy Miracle in the Art World

In 2012 Cecilia Giménez, an 83-year-old widow and amateur painter, attempted to restore Ecce Homo, an almost century-old fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns in her local church in Borja, Spain.

Despite a valiant effort, the tragically failed restoration went viral and Giménez’s attempt was met with mockery and scorn. Images of the botched fresco swirled around Twitter and Facebook, inspiring a slew of parodies now found on the Internet.

But, two years later, the village has reassessed their attitudes and turned their ridicule into gratitude. The viral images and memes gifted the rural town with free publicity—150,000 tourists from all over the world came to see Giménez’s artistic endeavor and visit the sanctuary overlooking Borja.

“Why are people coming to see it if it is such a terrible work of art?” asked Andrew Flack, an opera librettist who traveled to Borja for research on a new production. “It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, driven by the media into a phenomenon. God works in mysterious ways. Your disaster could be my miracle.”

A much-needed bolstering to the sleepy local economy ensued with restaurants opening and local and neighboring museums reporting the highest rates of visitation from the spill-over of tourists.

“The impact of Ecce Homo has been really great for businesses,” said Mr. Baya, a restaurateur who has done well enough to open a second restaurant. “Sadly, everyone heads to look at a painting that, frankly, is ugly.”

However “ugly” the fresco may be, Ecce Homo is stamped on the town’s lottery tickets and nearby vineyards are fighting over the right to use the image on wine labels. It’s even gotten plum positioning in a Spanish film in which thieves attempt to steal it.

https://news.artnet.com/in-brief/botched-restoration-of-jesus-fresco-miraculously-saves-spanish-town-19

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