In the Italian city of Livorno, there was an urban legend that the brilliant but tormented artist Amedeo Modigliani had once thrown a series of sculptures into a canal in a fit of despair. According to the story, Modigliani had returned to his hometown in 1909 with ambitions of becoming a sculptor. But when local critics mocked his elongated, abstract stone heads, he supposedly dragged them to the edge of the Fosso Reale canal and dumped them in, never to be seen again.
For years, this tale remained just that – a rumour passed between art students, gallery-goers and proud Livornese locals. But in 1984, to mark the centenary of Modigliani’s birth, the city decided it was time to separate fact from fiction.
And that’s when things got weird.
Livorno’s Museo d’Arte Moderna decided to dredge the Fosso Reale canal in search of the rumoured lost sculptures. In July 1984, the effort paid off: three stone heads were pulled from the water, each bearing Modigliani’s distinctive style – elongated necks and stylised features. The discovery caused a sensation. Art experts flocked to see them, newspapers ran breathless headlines, and several critics quickly declared them authentic.
It was a dream come true – a romantic story of misunderstood genius, restored a century later. Except it was all a lie.
Just weeks after the big reveal, three art students, Pietro Luridiana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Ghelarducci came forward on national television and confessed: they had sculpted one of the heads themselves – using a Black & Decker drill and a chisel. They dumped it into the canal late at night as a prank, never imagining it would be taken seriously.
And they weren’t the only ones.
A Livorno dockworker and part-time artist named Angelo Froglia admitted to creating the other two heads. But his motives were different. Froglia saw it as a performance – a way to expose how easily the art establishment could be fooled when they wanted to believe a good story.
He even filmed himself sculpting the fake heads before planting them, later releasing it as a short documentary called Peitho e Apate, named after the Greek goddesses of persuasion and deceit.
The fallout was swift and brutal. Critics who had praised the heads as authentic Modiglianis were humiliated. Museum officials resigned. The art world was left with the realisation that even trained experts can be misled by myth, media hype, and wishful thinking.
As for the students? They became minor celebrities in Italy – their prank immortalised as one of the greatest art hoaxes of the 20th century. Two of the fake heads are even on permanent display in Livorno – not as frauds, but as part of art history in their own right. Because sometimes, it’s not the artwork itself that endures, but the story behind it – and this one has certainly earned its place in the art world’s hall of legends.
Image Credit: Amedeo Modigliani, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
