Bluemel, Carl [or Blümel]

Date born: 1893

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Date died:

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Director of the Berlin State Museum and early examiner of material used by ancient Greeks.  Bluemel weighed in on the controversial authenticity case of the Metropolitan bronze horse.  The antiquities procurer John Marshall (1862-1928) had acquired a small bronze horse in 1923 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  In 1967, the museum's financial director, Joseph V. Noble and the curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art, Dietrich von Bothmer (q.v.), announced that the bronze was a forgery based upon stylistic grounds and gamma ray testing.  Bluemel, however doubted their findings along with the curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cornelius Vermeule (q.v.).  When more sophisticated technical tests were performed, the work was proven to indeed have been 2000-4000 years old. 

Home Country: Germany

Sources: KRG, 42;  Tomkins, Calvin.  Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  2nd. ed.  New York: Henry Holt, 1989, p. 133.

Bibliography: Griechische Bildhauerarbeit. Ergänzungsheft 11. Jahrbusc des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927.