By Jessica Cha
Staff Writer

Students in Sarah Crider’s art and archaeology class visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art to learn more about the making of forgeries on Jan. 24.

The class started by learning the basics of making and identifying forgeries.

“We learned about famous painters and how forgers began copying their styles and techniques and selling their own paintings and sculptures,” Devin Norton ’14 said.

Students were also able to make their own pigments to understand the significance of chemistry in determining forgeries.

Students said that the trip to the art museum gave them a live experience at viewing the famous paintings and sculptures that they had studied in books. They were given a packet that outlined the basics of the class and acted as a guide through the museum. It helped them understand the transfer between their studies from art to archaeology.

Although the students enjoyed seeing the different forms of art that they did not study, the sculptures and paintings that they had previously studied in their class stood out.

“I was looking at a sculpture of Athena, and I realized that there were two essential missing pieces to the sculpture- the two gems that were meant to be her eyes,” Norton said. “I thought it was interesting how we usually visualize the art as a whole, when there could be defining characteristics of the actual piece that are fake or missing.”