# When a Museum Tests Its Own Object > Across the five objects in this archive whose catalogue entries were rewritten by physical analysis, four of the tests were run or published by the museum that owned the object. The results went against the owner as often as for it. > The Study - 2026-09-03 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/when-a-museum-tests-its-own-object/ ## Key points - In four of the five cases in this archive, the institution holding the object commissioned, ran or published the analysis that changed its own catalogue entry. The fifth is the only one whose attribution is still unresolved, and it is the only one tested entirely from outside. - The direction of the result is not what the incentive would predict. Two objects here were demoted by the science and two were restored by it, and one of the restorations reversed a forgery verdict that the owning museum's own vice-director had announced in public. - A demotion almost never removes the object from the collection. All five are still held. What changes is the catalogue line, and the catalogue line is a public document anyone can check against an accession number. - Cleveland's record is the clearest case of an institution publishing against itself: a date field reading 1640 to 1950 sits beside a culture field reading in the style of the Buyid period, on an object the museum bought as tenth-century and toured internationally for four decades. ## The instrument that settles the question usually belongs to the party that loses ## Cleveland changed two fields on its own record and kept the textile ## The Metropolitan's own vice-director announced that its best bronze was a fraud ## Thirteen years of the same museum's work put the horse back into antiquity ## The Getty tested a cabinet its own curators had written off ## The counter-case is the bust whose test came from outside ## What the institution does next is the part that tells you most ## Why this archive is free to read The instrument that settles an attribution is expensive, and in this archive it is nearly always paid for by the party with the most to lose. That runs against the incentive most people assume operates inside museums, and it is the reason a catalogue line is worth more than a wall label or a press release: the line records what the holder is prepared to publish against itself. When a museum's own date field contradicts the description that brought the object through the door, the system is working, and any reader with an accession number can confirm it. ## Questions **Do museums cover it up when their own objects turn out to be wrongly attributed?** Not in the cases this archive holds. In four of five, the institution owning the object commissioned or published the analysis that changed its catalogue entry, and in every case the public record was amended rather than the object withdrawn. **Can a scientific test prove who made an object?** Rarely. Radiocarbon and thermoluminescence date a material or a firing, not an authorship. The 2021 Flora bust study excluded the Renaissance and therefore Leonardo, and its authors state that this is a negative finding which does not place the bust in any particular sculptor's hands. **If a museum object is exposed as a forgery, is it taken off display?** Usually not. All five objects here remain in their collections. A demoted object is still evidence of the workshop, the market or the controversy that produced it, so institutions tend to recatalogue rather than deaccession. **How can I check whether an attribution has changed?** Look up the museum's own online collection record by accession number and compare the date and culture fields with the credit line. The credit line normally preserves the year of acquisition and the fund used, which is where the superseded attribution is still legible. ## Sources - [1] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record for Tomb Cover, accession 1954.780, giving the date as 1640-1950 (radiocarbon date, 95% probability) and the culture as Iraq or Iran, in the style of the Buyid period (945-1055). - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for Bronze statuette of a horse, accession 23.69, giving the period as Late Hellenistic and the date as late 2nd-1st century BCE, credit line Fletcher Fund, 1923. Consulted through the Museum's Open Access collection API. - [3] J. Paul Getty Museum, exhibition page for A Renaissance Cabinet Rediscovered, 22 November 2005 to 5 August 2007, giving the dendrochronological felling date of late 1574 or early 1575 and the radiocarbon range of 1400 to 1600. - [4] Ina Reiche, Lucile Beck, Ingrid Caffy and others, 'New results with regard to the Flora bust controversy: radiocarbon dating suggests nineteenth century origin', Scientific Reports, 15 April 2021, doi 10.1038/s41598-021-85505-x. - [5] CNRS press release, 'Leonardo da Vinci definitely did not sculpt the Flora bust', naming the three collaborating laboratories and the marine reservoir correction developed for spermaceti.