# Bronze statuette of a horse > Unrecorded Greek bronze caster - Late Hellenistic, late 2nd to 1st century BCE. Catalogued as about 480 to 470 BCE from 1923 until the 1970s. > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unrecorded-greek-bronze-caster/met-bronze-horse-23-69/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-08 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unrecorded Greek bronze caster - **Date:** Late Hellenistic, late 2nd to 1st century BCE. Catalogued as about 480 to 470 BCE from 1923 until the 1970s. - **Medium:** Bronze, cast by the lost-wax process over a ceramic core with iron armature and chaplets - **Dimensions:** H. 40.2 cm (15 13/16 in.) - **Object type:** Sculpture - **Period:** Greek, Late Hellenistic - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Greek and Roman Art - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A bronze horse forty centimetres high, bought by the Metropolitan Museum from a Paris dealer on 16 February 1923 and for forty years described as the most important single object in its classical collection. In December 1967 the Museum's own Vice-Director for Administration, Joseph V. Noble, stood up at the close of a public seminar on art forgery and announced that it was a fake made in Paris between 1918 and 1923. He published the case in the Museum's Bulletin the following February under the title The Forgery of Our Greek Bronze Horse, and ended it with the sentence: it is famous, but it is a fraud.He was wrong, and the way in which he was wrong is the reason this record exists. The seam that started the investigation lay in a layer of pigmented wax applied to the bronze in the 1920s or 1930s, and it disappeared when the wax was removed with xylene. The iron wire he read in a gamma radiograph was an armature of a kind found in the Piraeus Kouros and the Delphi Charioteer. Thermoluminescence measurements on zircon grains separated from the ceramic core, published in Archaeometry in 1974, gave an age of 2250 plus or minus 210 years before present.The horse is back on the Museum's books as an ancient bronze. It is not, however, back where it started: acquired as an Early Classical masterpiece of about 480 to 470 BCE, it is now catalogued as Late Hellenistic, late 2nd to 1st century BCE. The attribution moved twice, and only one of those moves is famous. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **late 2nd to 1st century BCE** Unrecorded `[documented]` (origin) Cast by the lost-wax process over a ceramic core. Thermoluminescence dating of the core gives 2250 plus or minus 210 years before present, which the measuring laboratory interprets as manufacture between about 500 BCE and 50 BCE with equal probability across that span. The Museum's stylistic date is late 2nd to 1st century BCE. No findspot, workshop or patron is recorded. - **-1923** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) Nothing is recorded of the horse between its manufacture and its appearance with a Paris dealer. No excavation, collection, sale or export is documented in any source consulted. - **before 1923-1923** An unnamed dealer in Paris `[disputed]` (trade) Noble records only that the piece was bought on 16 February 1923 from a dealer in Paris. He is the primary source for the date and he names nobody. The city matters to his own argument, because he proposed that the horse had been made in Paris between 1918 and 1923, which would place manufacture and sale within five years and in the same city. - **1923-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased 16 February 1923, Fletcher Fund, accession 23.69. Removed from exhibition 15 September 1961 on Dietrich von Bothmer's instruction. Declared a forgery by Vice-Director Joseph V. Noble in December 1967 and in the Museum's Bulletin of February 1968. Submitted to the Museum's Conservation Department on 3 January 1968. Antiquity re-established by thermoluminescence published in 1974 and by the full technical report of 1981. Now catalogued as Greek, Late Hellenistic, and released as public domain under the Museum's open access programme. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This object has never been sold at public auction. It was acquired privately from a dealer in Paris on 16 February 1923 and has been institutional property ever since. No purchase price has been published in the sources consulted, so there is no hammer and no premium to separate. ## Open questions - Who was the Paris dealer, and what did the Museum pay on 16 February 1923? Noble's 1968 account gives the date and the city and nothing else, and no price appears in the sources consulted. - Where was the horse found? No findspot is recorded in any source consulted, and the lead isotope work narrows the ore source to the Mediterranean without locating the object. - On what date did the Museum publicly restore the attribution, and in what form? Secondary accounts refer to a panel in 1972, but the sources consulted here document only the publications of 1974 and 1981. - What published argument supports the Late Hellenistic re-dating? The Museum's catalogue entry now gives late 2nd to 1st century BCE on stylistic grounds, and no specific study making that case has been identified. - How many plaster casts were made, and where are they now? Thousands were sold at the Museum's sales desk and at Brentano's, and the piece mould taken for them is the direct cause of the 1967 misreading. - Was the incised line on the face intended as a modelling guide, a stylistic convention or something else? It is deliberate and it is paralleled on marble horse heads in Athens, but its purpose is not established. ## Sources - [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access collection record for accession 23.69, Bronze statuette of a horse, Greek, Late Hellenistic, late 2nd to 1st century BCE, Fletcher Fund 1923. Machine-readable object record giving title, culture, period, date range, medium, dimensions, credit line, department and public-domain status. - [2] Joseph V. Noble, 'The Forgery of Our Greek Bronze Horse', in 'Art Forgery', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, new series 26, no. 6 (February 1968), pp. 253-256; with Thomas P. F. Hoving, 'The Game of Duplicity', in the same issue. Primary source for the 1923 purchase date, the 1961 observation, the Bedi Rassy demonstration, the 1967 gamma radiography and the forgery announcement. - [3] Kate C. Lefferts, Lawrence J. Majewski, Edward V. Sayre, Pieter Meyers, with R. M. Organ, C. S. Smith, Robert H. Brill, I. Lynus Barnes, Thomas J. Murphy and Frederick R. Matson, 'Technical Examination of the Classical Bronze Horse from The Metropolitan Museum of Art', Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 21, no. 1 (1981), pp. 1-42. The full re-examination, including the thermoluminescence results first published by Zimmerman, Yuhas and Meyers in Archaeometry 16 (1974), pp. 19-30. - [4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public collection page for accession 23.69. Canonical museum record. Automated requests to this page returned HTTP 429 during research, so the catalogue data in this record was taken from the Museum's own Open Access API at source 1. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Joseph V. Noble'. Tertiary source, used only for the statement that a panel found otherwise in 1972 and for Noble's role in exposing the Metropolitan's Etruscan terracotta warriors. Flagged for replacement with the finding aid for the Joseph V. Noble Records in the Metropolitan Museum Archives. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.