The Getty kouros

The documents failed first. The Getty's own later inquiries found that a 1952 letter attributed to Ernst Langlotz, then the leading scholar of Greek sculpture, carried a postal code not introduced until 1972, and that a 1955 letter about repairs referred to a bank account not opened until 1963. The provenance was an elaborate fabrication, which means there are no reliable facts about the statue's history before 1983.

The object itself is genuinely contested, and the disagreement runs between named specialists on both sides.

For authenticity: the sculpture conforms to the canon of proportion for archaic kouroi; the tool marks are consistent with sixth-century practice; and Ilse Kleemann identified the subtle indication of movement to the figure's right — a feature of kouroi placed in relation to a temple's naos, and one a forger would have to know and reproduce deliberately. Norman Herz's isotopic analysis placed the dolomitic marble on Thasos, and Stanley Margolis showed the surface had undergone de-dolomitization, a weathering process then thought to require centuries.

Against: the style is eclectic to the point of incoherence, with features spanning a century of development from the hair to the feet; the ears are asymmetrical and set at different heights; and in 1990 Jeffrey Spier published a torso, a certain forgery, that shares the Getty piece's dolomitic marble and several of its mannerisms. Most damagingly, the de-dolomitization argument was undercut when the process was demonstrated artificially, removing the one piece of evidence that had seemed to require real age.

The Getty's response was to say so: the gallery label read 'Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery', which is the rarest sentence in museum practice. Director Timothy Potts confirmed the statue was taken off display in 2018 because its authenticity remains disputed.