Audery Hempburn in the movie mentions treating a sculpture with a compound called Potassium Argon, which would date and locate the marble to the time of cutting (I assume this means quarrying?), so my question is does anyone know if this is real, and how effective is it? Can you bake a sculpture or coat it in another kind of chemical to age it like van Meegeren did to his Vermeers and de Hooughs?
Jeff
The Potassium-Argon test is used for dating rock formations, mainly due to the long half-life of Potasium. Because the results approximate when the rock was formed and not when it was cut, the test would be more useful for matching two sculptures cut from the same source.
Soaking the forgery in an extremely precise mixture of Potassium, Argon and Calcium to give an aged test result would be unlikely to work. The mixture wouldn't penetrate a metamorphic rock like marble. You'd have a thin chalky layer over the entire surface that wouldn't produce a significant trace if a sample were chipped or scraped off for analysis. It would likely be polished away first anyway.
A more viable method would be to acquire a statue of near equal age that had been severely devalued by weather or wear and use the relatively untouched marble underneath the surface to duplicate a highly sought after work from the same geographic region. After which you could use acid washes to make the new surface appear more authentic. I'm guessing hasty collectors wouldn't even bother to check how you obtained the piece. Rich and unscrupulous, with those conditions satisfied I'd happily raise a glass of brandy with Charles.
So it would be not unlike most of the painting forgers who used the period cavases of old and uknown artists to paint on so that the canvas would be datable to the proper period.
Provenance was often the least concern for painters like Keating. They could always cook something up, find a collection that it be claimed to be from, or make a collection up themselves. There was a British guy whose name I can't remember in the fifties who was an art restorer himself and would use that as a way to build provenance, in any case due to the secret nature of the art world often even scrupulous collectors only get hastily built stories about the history of the piece, just so long as it is not already well known any decent forgery can be made to fool just about anyone, it takes real digging to prove a provenance false anyway.
I was wondering the same thing. I thought I was going to have to ask my chemistry teacher. thanks.
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