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dubdobdee3.
i. who ‘discovered’ Vortigern?
ii. which Old Borstalian was unmasked by Oberhuber?
iii. which epistle, allegedly from Grigori, helped Stanley to defeat Ramsay?
iv. who created documents covering an 11-year period, supposedly found in a hayloft in the DDR?
v. who produced a group of physicians to prove his innocence, but laid himself open to alternative charges?
vi. who was able, through his own work, to convince experts that the painter Martini was also a sculptor?
vii. which self-styled Japanese heathen described an island where broiled serpents were a favourite dish?
viii. in what was the mandible of pygmaeus equipped with the dentition of troglodytes?
ix. who palmed off depictions of a Brighton suburb, but later owned up?
x. who provided Lübeck with an anachronistic fowl?
rules:
a: give nice full answers and anecdotes!
b: say if googled or not
c: you're obviously allowed to look ahead and future questions as (first) this was published in a national newspaper and i can't stop you and (second) i can't stop me either, and have done just this
*i know the theme i think, and also iii., iv., and viii. (w/o googlin yet)
i. who ‘discovered’ Vortigern?
ii. which Old Borstalian was unmasked by Oberhuber?
iii. which epistle, allegedly from Grigori, helped Stanley to defeat Ramsay?
iv. who created documents covering an 11-year period, supposedly found in a hayloft in the DDR?
v. who produced a group of physicians to prove his innocence, but laid himself open to alternative charges?
vi. who was able, through his own work, to convince experts that the painter Martini was also a sculptor?
vii. which self-styled Japanese heathen described an island where broiled serpents were a favourite dish?
viii. in what was the mandible of pygmaeus equipped with the dentition of troglodytes?
ix. who palmed off depictions of a Brighton suburb, but later owned up?
x. who provided Lübeck with an anachronistic fowl?
rules:
a: give nice full answers and anecdotes!
b: say if googled or not
c: you're obviously allowed to look ahead and future questions as (first) this was published in a national newspaper and i can't stop you and (second) i can't stop me either, and have done just this
*i know the theme i think, and also iii., iv., and viii. (w/o googlin yet)
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 12:49 pm (UTC)iii. is the Zinoviev letter.
iv. is the Knitler Diaries. I can't remember who created them though!
viii. - piltdown man?
One of them must surely be Ossian, but only i seems to fit.
No googling.
NO GOOGLO
Date: 2008-01-04 12:50 pm (UTC)forgers, fakers, con-men and/or similar.
Problem is that didn't help me come up with any Actual Answers at all! But still:
iv) Probably those fake Hitler diaries? Don't remember his name at all.
viii) Well, Pan pygmaeus is the bonobo = dwarf chimp, and Pan troglodytes = regular chimp (with the gorilla the living species most closely related to us), so I guess someone may have combined jaw from the former with teeth from the latter and tried to pass it off as Hitherto Unknown Species or Missing Link or something?
Re: NO GOOGLO
Date: 2008-01-04 01:16 pm (UTC)Re: NO GOOGLO
Date: 2008-01-04 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 12:56 pm (UTC)iii. haha ok if tom is right (which seems likely) then i got the theme either by a mistaken or misremembered bit of "knowledge", or i have unearthed a "hidden doorway" -- viz i thought it was the forged letter in SMILEY'S PEOPLE, with smiley = mr stanley, karla = mr ramsey and grigori = grigorievitch... !!
iv. hitler diaries
viii. piltdown man
no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 01:00 pm (UTC)viii. the piltdown forgery matched a skullpiece of early man with a jawbone of an ape i think -- would have to look it up exactly -- to produce a "missing link"
ix. in the late 70s there was a twinkly old forger who painted some fake samuel palmers -- the word "palm" is the only reason i am makin this connection obv...
Here Be Alans
Date: 2008-01-04 12:59 pm (UTC)Re: Here Be Alans
Date: 2008-01-04 01:00 pm (UTC)Re: Here Be Alans
Date: 2008-01-04 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 03:51 pm (UTC)ii. "Eric Hebborn was born to a Cockney family in 1934... At the age of eight, he states in his autobiography that he set fire to his school and was sent to Borstal reformatory, although his sister Rosemary disputes this... [H]e became part of the international art scene and formed acquaintances with many artists and art historians, including the British spy, Sir Anthony Blunt in 1960, who told Hebborn that a couple of his drawings looked like Poussins. This sowed the seeds of his forgery career... When contemporary critics did not seem to appreciate his own paintings, Hebborn began to copy the style of old masters such as; Corot, Castiglione, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, Rubens, Jan Breughel and Piranesi... In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Conrad Oberhuber... noticed that two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper... [but] waited a full 18 months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit"
iii. "The Zinoviev Letter is thought to have been instrumental in [Stanley Baldwin's] Conservative Party's victory in the United Kingdom general election, 1924, which ended the country's first Labour government... The letter was allegedly addressed from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern), and Arthur MacManus, the British representative on the presidium, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain... Published in the conservative British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the election, the letter came at a sensitive time also in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, owing to Conservative opposition to the forthcoming parliamentary ratification of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement of August 8...British Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald's attempts to cast doubt on the letter's authenticity were hampered by its widespread acceptance among government officials. MacDonald "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea", he told his Cabinet on October 31 as they prepared to leave office."
Iv. "In April 1983, the German news magazine Stern published extracts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries, which were subsequently exposed as forgeries... Journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have discovered them, and submitted them to be reviewed by a number of experts in World War II history, notably the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg. At a press conference on April 25, 1983, the diaries were declared by these experts to be authentic... The diaries were actually written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger of Hitler's works. Both he and Heidemann went to trial in 1985 and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison."
v. [???]
no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 03:51 pm (UTC)vii. " George Psalmanazar was born in southern France to Catholic parents sometime between 1679 and 1684. His birth name is unknown. He was educated in a Jesuit school, but discontinued his education after becoming bored with his studies. In order to gain safe and affordable travel in France, he decided to pretend to be an Irish pilgrim on his way to Rome... but soon found that there were too many people who actually knew something about Ireland. Then he switched to being first a Japanese convert and then a heathen to sound even more exciting... He appeared in northern Europe, around the year 1700. He looked European but claimed he came from the faraway island of Formosa, followed a foreign calendar and worshipped the Sun and the Moon; [a Scottish priest] claimed he had converted the heathen into Christianity and christened him as George Psalmanazar (in reference to biblical Assyrian king Shalmaneser)... In London, the foreigner gathered even more fame by his strange habits. He ate raw meat with lots of spices and slept upright in a chair. He claimed he had been abducted from Formosa by Jesuits and taken to France, where he had refused to become Roman Catholic. In 1704, Psalmanazar published a book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan which revealed a number of strange habits. Formosa was a prosperous country of wealth with a capital city called Xternetsa. Men walked naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. Their main food was a serpent that they hunted with branches. Formosans were polygamous and husbands had a right to eat their wives for infidelity. They executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows. Annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priests ate the bodies. They also used horses and camels for mass transportation. The book also described the Formosan alphabet."
viii. "From the chronology and the later reconstruction of events it is fairly clear that there never were any significant fossils at the Piltdown quarry. It was salted from time to time with fossils to be found. Once the hoax was exposed, Sir Kenneth Oakley went on to apply more advanced tests to find where the bones had come from and how old they were. His main findings were: Piltdown I skull: Medieval, human, ~620 years old; Piltdown II skull: Same source as Piltdown I skull; Piltdown I jawbone: Orangutan [Pongo pygmaeus] jaw, ~500 years old, probably from Sarawak; Elephant molar: Genuine fossil, probably from Tunisia; Hippopotamus tooth: Genuine fossil, probably from Malta or Sicily Canine tooth: Pleistocene chimpanzee [Pan troglodytes] fossil."
ix. [ still think this might be Tom Keating forging Samuel Palmer but google isn't helping me...]
x. [might be duck-related, will check w.dr quack]
x Lothar Malskat
Date: 2008-01-04 10:20 pm (UTC)Lothar Malskat (born on May 3 1913 in Königsberg, died on February 10 1988 in Wulfsdorf near Lübeck) was a German painter and art restorer who repainted medieval frescoes of Marienkirche in Lübeck, Germany.
Lothar Malskat was a painter from Königsberg. In 1951 he was part of the group of Dietrich Fey, whose firm was commissioned to restore the frescoes of cathedral of Marienkirche in Lubeck. The cathedral had been severely damaged in World War II bombings and left to its own devices after the war, so the medieval frescoes on its walls had nearly disappeared. Church had received donations worth DM 150.000 for restoration and Fey's company did the work behind closed doors. The work was finished September 2, 1951.
The restorers were praised for their good work. Frescoes were unveiled during the Seven-hundredth Anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Marienkirche; present dignitaries included various government ministers, including Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. West German government printed 2 million postage stamps depicting the frescoes.
The next year Malskat announced that he had painted the frescoes himself. When he was ignored, he told his own lawyer to sue both Fey and himself. Both men were eventually arrested.
Trial began in 1954. Evidence included Malskat's other forgeries of works of Marc Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Malskat told that when the work had begun, the walls had been nearly empty of frescoes; he proved it presenting a film depicting the unpainted walls. Instead of restoring the original frescoes, Malskat had whitewashed the walls and painted them over. New pictures included various anachronisms like an image of turkey, which had not reached Europe at the time the original frescoes had been painted. Malskat had modelled various religious figures on her sister Freyda, actresses like Marlene Dietrich and even historical figures like Rasputin.
Fey was sentenced for 20 months and Malskat for 18. The frescoes were washed off the church walls.
After Malskat was released, he began to paint in his own name. He painted decorations on restaurants and inns, including the Tre Kronor Inn in Stockholm. He also arranged exhibitions of his works in northern Germany.
[edit]
Re: x Lothar Malskat
Date: 2008-01-05 04:18 pm (UTC)v. The QI forumers have suggested Galileo (which doesn't fit very well with the forger theme) and one Charles B. Huntingdon (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9402E3D81039E134BC4152DFB467838D649FDE) (apparently insanity-based defence in some forgery case in 1856). Tough one.
ix. [ still think this might be Tom Keating forging Samuel Palmer but google isn't helping me...]
Can Shoreham be said to be a suburb of Brighton, though?
WP: "In 1970, auctioneers noticed that there were thirteen watercolor paintings of Samuel Palmer for sale - all of them depicting the same theme, the town of Shoreham. When an article published in The Times discussed the auctioneer's suspicions about their provenance, Keating confessed that they were his. He also estimated that more than 2,000 of his forgeries were in circulation. He had created them, he declared, as a protest against those art traders who get rich at the artist's expense. He also refused to list the forgeries."
Re: x Lothar Malskat
Date: 2008-01-05 04:24 pm (UTC)ps who is the excellent anon who posted the lothar malskat solution?
Re: x Lothar Malskat
Date: 2008-01-05 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-06 08:51 pm (UTC)