The Events That Inspired Phallacy

In 1983 the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, Austria launched a research project intended to resolve issues pertaining to the techniques employed in shaping and casting the museum’s prized sculpture, "Youth from the Magdalensberg.” The bronze statue, the jewel of the antiquities collection, was the object in question. Using cutting edge chemical analysis, the scientists’ results sent a shockwave through the museum: the statue is not an antique original but rather a cast copy from the 16th century.

The museum first acquired the Youth in 1806, believing it to be a Roman sculpture from the first century BC that had been discovered by farming peasants in 1502. This discovery was widely documented at the time; even the artist Albrecht Dürer is thought to have admired the statue’s beauty during his first trip to Italy. It is now believed that a copy was made before the original was given to king Ferdinand I, but at some point in the following years, the original was lost and the Renaissance cast was mistaken for the original.

The most important indication that the Youth is a Renaissance copy and not the antique original is the technique of its forming and casting. The statue was made with the help of negatives taken from the original and is cast in a technique unknown in antiquity but used in the 16th century. Other indications include the thickness of the bronze and the fact that the statue was cast in one piece.

Neither the exact year nor the location of where the cast was made is known. The loss of 1600 years certainly has implications for the value of the piece. However, the museum holds the statue’s status firmly in place by maintaining, “The statue in the Collection of Antiquities is one of the earliest Renaissance cast copies of a large-scale antique bronze.”

The characters in Phallacy are not based on specific people, but the drama that unfolded as a result of this clash between art and science is very real.