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The Gold
Museum
 
After our psycho minibus driver had
thrown us around for a while we landed at the Gold Museum. It is considered one
of Lima’s premier attractions. It houses the private collection of Miguel Mujica
Gallo, who spent years amassing it, often by purchasing relics from grave
robbers. Downstairs is the large collection, laid out in several
rooms of gold figures, jewelry, masks, knives and artifacts from the Inca
and colonial periods. It also contains mummies, headdresses and other ancient
relics. I was saddened to see the items numbered with labels made on an old
Dymo. We questioned the guide as to why the gold did not glisten and he answered
"Due to the alloys in it " OH YEAH. Pull the other one. The stones, oars, pins
and bits were interesting but we were suss about the skulls showing very neat
surgery to repair a weapon hole, way too shiny.
Upstairs however, is a truly
fascinating arms museum, which houses weapons and armour from many cultures,
guns, knives and uniforms, although once again I was disappointed that the
Bearskin was fake. Artifacts from Peru’s history, such as items owned by the
Pizarro brothers and Simón Bolívar.
José Gabriel Chueca for The
Art Newspaper. In 2001, a huge scandal broke out. It was proven that many of the
pieces in the museum were fakes. Experts had been suspicious of many of the
pieces for years. The Mujica Gallo family claimed that the fakes had been
purchased by mistake and that the museum now only houses genuine pieces.
However, there is still a cloud of skepticism that hangs over the exhibits.
The most popular
museum in Peru, the Gold Museum (Museo del Oro) in Lima, is at the heart of an
argument which is stirring archaeologists the world over, but is also stirring
the Peruvian government. After countless tests and twenty years of argument, the
pre-Columbian gold pieces in the collection have been declared fakes.
The Gold Museum was established twenty years ago
and prided itself on possessing one of the largest collections of pre-Columbian
gold in the world. However, in July, after more than four months of tests
carried out by specialists at the Catholic University of Peru, the museum was
examined by the Institute for the Defense of Competition and of
Intellectual Property, or Indecopi. In fact, since
the 1980's Indecopi has been suspicious about the authenticity of the
collections in the Gold Museum. The first reports suggested that 85% of the
metal pieces on display were fakes. In August, the cultural commission of the
government also looked into the scandal. Sanctions, which have not yet been
imposed, could consist simply of a threat to prosecute, but there could also be
direct legal action. The museum might, for example, be forced to publicise the
fact that of "4,349 metal pieces analysed, 4,237 are false and more than 100
have aroused strong suspicions concerning their authenticity".
The museum's founder and, until
1993, owner of the largest number of gold objects in the country, Miguel Mufica
Gallo, died a few days before the cultural commission took up the case.
Described by the magazine Carelas as "a hunter of tigers and elephants,
and the biggest collector of pre-Columbian gold and arms in Peru", Miguel Mujica
Gallo, who was born in 1910, was ambassador in Austria and Spain and for a short
time was minister of foreign affairs in the first government of Fernando
Belaunde. From the outset, the Peruvian
archaeological community suspected a number of pieces that formed the heart of
his collection of not being genuine. In 1986, during an exhibition in a Canadian
museum, specialists had expressed their reserves about the Gold Museum. During
the 1990's, experts from the Instituto Nacional de Cultura (the organization
which is responsible for giving export licenses to archaeological objects)
confirmed that a number of pieces were fake. In fact, in 1999, an analysis of
the objects on their way to an exhibition in Bohlingen in Germany concluded that
many of the pieces had been made by combining ancient gold from various
provenances. Others were modern, made by artisans in the countryside north of
Lima.
In
1996 an argument raging within the Mujica Gallo family revealed the scandal to
the press: letters concerning the division of the family possessions were
published in the leading Peruvian newspaper, El Comercio. Having decided
to exclude his seven children from his will, Miguel Mujica Gallo left the
administration of the foundation to his daughter Victoria, who has been its
director since January 2001. Victoria, in some embarrassment, has claimed that
the assessors of the foundation took advantage of her father's illness to
introduce some fake pieces into the collection. As a result of the scandal the
future of the Gold Museum in Lima is extremely uncertain.
For our part it
did not stop us visiting, there were few people other than us. In my
opinion it just elevated the Gulbenkian Museum even
higher.
ALL IN ALL THE SHINY
STUFF WAS DULL, DYMO LABELS A SHAM BUT AN INTERESTING
COLLECTION
GOLD BIT DISAPPOINTING - ARMS AND UNIFORMS
FASCINATING
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