Émile Gilliéron: the Man Who Sold the Ancient World

Left: The Mask of Agamemnon (c. 1906)

Right: Émile Gilliéron (1850-1924)

 

 

I. 

 

If you are ever fortunate enough to visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you'll be able to see Émile Gilliéron's electroformed reproduction [1] of the Mask of Agamemnon made around 1906. 

 

It's just one of many galvano-plastic copies of Mycenaean antiquities made by Gilliéron and purchased by the Met's eminent curator Gisela M. A. Richter, who described the Swiss master's work as being of such fine quality and such historical accuracy as to give a vivid idea of how the originals would have looked.  

 

But did Gilliéron not merely reimagine antiquity, but also partly invent it? And might he best be remembered as the man who sold the myth of the ancient world? 

 

 

II.

 

Born in Switzerland in 1850, Gilliéron was universally admired for his reconstructions of Mycenaean and Minoan artefacts from the Bronze Age. 

 

But admiration alone doesn't pay the bills and so he eventually decided to cash in on his talents, establishing a successful business in 1894, in collaboration with a German metalworking firm, producing and selling replicas of archaeological finds to museums and collectors in Europe and the United States. 

 

His son, also named Émile, entered the business in 1909 and the pair have been credited as a crucial influence on the modern perception of Greek antiquity; their work enabling artists, academics, and members of the public to appreciate the genius of the ancient world. 

 

But it needs to be stressed that many of their restorations were based on mere fragments of damaged material and that they often had to make rather bold imaginative decisions, exercising a hefty degree of artistic license. 

 

This was amusingly recognised by the English writer Evelyn Waugh who, following a visit to the Archaeological Museum in Herakleion in 1929 to view some examples of Minoan artwork, declared it "impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate prediliction for the covers of Vogue" [2]. 

 

Take the fresco known as the Ladies in Blue, for example ...  

 

III.

 

Fragments of this fresco, depicting young women with distinctly modern looking hairstyles but thought to date to c. 1450 BCE, were discovered at the Palace of Knossos, on the island of Crete, by Sir Arthur John Evans at the start of the 20th century. The work was restored by Gilliéron to such an extent that it is now recognised by archaeologists as almost entirely his composition.

 

Referring to the Gilliérons' habit of combining fragments later evaluated to have come from discrete images, a modern study has concluded that father and son "created a decorative programme which, as it currently stands, never existed" [3].

 

Further, Gilliéron was suspected of involvement in the illegal export of forged antiquities from Greece and accused by his critics of deliberately manufacturing fake objects (not merely reproducing and touching up old pieces). 

 

In sum: far be it from me to suggest that ancient history is more or less bunk - or that culture is always closely associated with crime - but we do need to keep in mind that authenticity is itself a form of artifice (just another irritating pose, as Lord Henry Wotton might say).    

 

Reproduction of the "Ladies in Blue" fresco 

by Émile Gilliéron (1927)

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Electroformed reproduction was a technique developed in the nineteenth century that allowed for the manufacturing of many different kinds of historic metalworks and the disseminating of knowledge about the ancient world in a time before Google images and mass tourism. Despite the method and materials used to make electrotypes not being the same as those of the original artwork, most people -including art historians and museum curators - were happy to accept them as authentic replicas. 

      For more details, see the article by Dorothy H. Abramitis, 'The Mask of Agamemnon: An Example of Electroformed Reproduction of Artworks Made by E. Gilliéron in the Early Twentieth Century' (1 June, 2011): click here.

 

[2] Evelyn Waugh, quoted in an entry on The Met website discussing the 'Reproduction of the "Ladies in Blue" fresco', believed to date to c. 1525-1450 BCE, excavated before 1914, and restored by Gillieron père on the basis of other fragments of frescos from Knossos: click here. 

[3] See Yannis Galanakis, Efi Tsitsa, and Ute Günkel-Maschek, 'The Power of Images: Re-Examining the Wall Paintings from the Throne Room at Knossos', Annual of the British School at Athens (Cambridge University Press 2017) Vol. 112, pp. 47–98. The line quoted is on p. 50. The online version of this essay can be accessed by clicking here.