The hoax of Modigliani's fake Heads will be a film. With a Friends of Mine cut

One of the greatest hoaxes in art history will become a film. It stars the (fake) heads of Amedeo Modigliani that were found onJuly 24, 1984, in Livorno, Italy, and are now on display at Ferrara ’s Palazzo Bonacossi until Sept. 25, 2022.

The Ferrara Arte Foundation, on the occasion of the exhibition FAKES from Alceo Dossena to the Modigliani forgeries, created by an idea of Vittorio Sgarbi and curated by Dario Del Bufalo and Marco Horak, with the collaboration of Pietro Di Natale, contacted the authors to tell, thirty-eight years later, this chapter of forgery in art from their point of view.

Year 1984: it is the centenary of Modigliani’s birth; four of the twenty-six heads made by the artist are on display in Livorno. According to one legend, he himself threw four sculptures, deemed unsatisfactory, into the Livorno ditches before going to Paris. On the occasion of the exhibition, excavations for the search begin: no results. Enter three goliardic university students, Michele Ghelarducci, Pietro Luridiana and Pier Francesco Ferrucci, who decide to make a head with typical Modigliani features, and throw it into the ditch. On July 24 the discovery: the news goes around the world, experts and art critics are divided, the prank enters history.

“Realistically no one in Livorno thought they could really be found, it was a legend. The canal had already been cleaned up after the war and nothing had been found,” says Pierfrancesco Ferrucci. “We got the idea to take up that story. We hoped to be in the newspaper the next day.” The three friends were amazed, however, when other heads (made by sculptor Froglia, also now on display in Ferrara) were discovered first, “which everyone tried to pass off as authentic.”

Now nearly 40 years later this story will be made into a film. Livorno-based director Paolo Virzì is working on it, as the newspaper Il Tirreno reported in recent days. "The cut we want to give it is of the type Amici Miei by Monicelli, playful, but always truthful, at times profound, leaving the possibility of identifying with authentic characters,“ Ferrucci explains. ”It is the story of three boys who find themselves catapulted into the adult world at the very moment when they would have liked to remain teenagers again. The joke was perhaps intended precisely to postpone the transition to adulthood as far back as possible."

Michele Ghelarducci, Pietro Luridiana and Pier Francesco Ferrucci want to "clarify many points left unexplored.“ Above all, ”the attempted political instrumentalization of our gesture: in Livorno where the Communist Party was born, even today there are those who label it as a prank by boys from good families against the people. Many think we did it for money, but it was not so.“ Also still unexamined is ”the disappearance of Modigliani’s daughter, Jeanne, which occurred three days after the heads were found, on July 27, under circumstances that have not yet been clarified, before she went to Livorno to declare the works false.“ Everything has fallen into a kind of oblivion, according to Ferrucci, which is why ”the fiction would close the circle: in my heart I hope the city of Livorno will make peace with this story."

Finally, there is the desire that the works find a permanent location in a museum in Livorno, with an itinerary that tells the story.

Image: Pier Francesco Ferrucci, Homage to Modì (from Amedeo Modigliani)

The hoax of Modigliani's fake Heads will be a film. With a Friends of Mine cut

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