The second-largest museum in New York and one of the largest in the United States, Brooklyn Museum made a sensational statement: about ten of the thirty items of the collection of Coptic art held in the Egyptian department of the museum, are counterfeit or have been seriously revised in later time.

Custodian of Coptic art in the museum of Dr. Edna Brown explained that doubts about the authenticity of works it has emerged about four years ago, followed by a thorough study. While the technological expertise of all the works had not yet been completed, the museum has already started to prepare the exhibition of fakes, which will be held in February 2009.

The challenge of the future - to attract the attention of museum and the public to the problem of counterfeiting, which can be found in other museums in the United States. For example, an American from Baltimore vizantinist Vik Gary (Gary Vikan) in the early 1970's, suggested that in museum collections may be counterfeit items Byzantine or early Christian art, but he did not make their concerns widely publicized.

As for the collection of Coptic art of the Brooklyn Museum, which is considered the second largest in the United States, the majority of fakes come in a museum in the 1960's and 1970's, when shopping at department replenished art dealers in Switzerland and New York.

Anna Savitskaya

Source : www.independent . co.uk , www.lenta.ru