It was the summer of 1984on July 24, when three heads with elongated shapes emerged from a channel of Livornowith long noses and small eyes that immediately caught the attention of art experts: everyone was ready to attribute them to Amedeo Modiglianiwho passed away sixty years earlier. The discovery seemed to confirm a local legend that the artist threw four unsatisfactory sculptures into the canals. The heads were welcomed as a miracle, with Giulio Carlo Argan in the front row to guarantee their authenticity, but after forty days, three students confessed to having created one of the works as a jokeAnd the others two were performances by the port artist Angelo Frogliawhich wanted to show how fragile collective perception was. There “Livorno joke” shook the art world and its credibility.
In 1984, the hundred years since the birth of the artist, famous for his portraits characterized by elongated faces and pupilless cerulean eyes. At the Progressivo Museum of Modern Art in Livorno they were on display for the occasion four of the 26 heads of Modias the artist signed himself: on that occasion, the director of the museum and curator of the exhibition Vera Durbé (who worked in collaboration with her brother Dario, superintendent of the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome), gave space to an old legendaccording to which Modigliani would have thrown it into the canals of Livornohis hometown, four sculptures which he found unsatisfactory.
Given the curiosity of the public, and to give more light to the exhibition, the waters of the Fosso Reale began to be dredgedthe navigable canal in front of the Central Market, in search of works of art. After seven days of searching in vain, three stone heads were found from an excavator: it was a miracleand the works were immediately credited to Modigliani. For forty days the art world was thrilled, led by the most important Italian art critic, Giulio Carlo Argan, who did not doubt the authenticity of the findings.
Between about August and early September 1984, however, three local students – Pietro Luridiana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Ghelarducci – they had given an interview to Panorama in which they confessed to being the true authors of the second head caught in Livorno. Nothing more than a game, said the three, who had created the work with an electric drill Black & Decker. To accompany the scoop, that Mondadori had paid him 10 million lire, the weekly even published photos of the three students as they created the work in a garden. The three were then invited on television to repeat their experiment in front of ten million viewers. Thus “the Livorno hoax” became the joke of the century.
The art world clung to the fact that the three students were claiming only one of the three heads. However, the other two were claimed by the dockworker and artist Angelo Froglia, who wanted to do it this way “highlight how through a process of collective persuasion, through RAI, newspapers, chatter between people, people’s beliefs could be influenced“. And so it really happened: this twist profoundly shook the art world, calling into question not only the certainties of the experts, but also the very credibility of the artistic system.
