It was the summer of 1984, on 24 July, when three elongated heads emerged from a canal in Livorno, with long noses and small eyes that immediately caught the attention of art experts: everyone was ready to attribute them to Amedeo Modigliani, who had died 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 joke, and the other two turned out to be performances by the port artist Angelo Froglia, who wanted to show how fragile the collective perception was. The “Livorno hoax” shook the art world and its credibility.
In 1984, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the artist was celebrated in Livorno, famous for his portraits characterized by elongated faces and cerulean eyes without pupils. At the Progressivo Museum of Modern Art in Livorno, four of Modì’s 26 heads, as the artist signed himself, were on display for the occasion: 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 legend, according to which Modigliani threw four sculptures that he found unsatisfactory into the canals of Livorno, his hometown.
Given the curiosity of the public, and to give more light to the exhibition, the waters of the Fosso Reale, the navigable canal in front of the Central Market, began to be dredged in search of works of art. After seven days of searching in vain, three stone heads were found by an excavator: a miracle was claimed, and 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 August and the beginning of September 1984, however, three local students – Pietro Luridiana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Ghelarducci – gave an interview to Panorama in which they confessed to being the true authors of the second head found in Livorno. Nothing more than a game, said the three, who had created the work with a Black & Decker electric drill. 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 dock worker and artist Angelo Froglia, who in this way wanted to “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.
