ARTISTIC FORGERIES. - When the Romans, having conquered Greece, became enthusiastic about its civilization and sought to procure its most refined products, forgeries began. Thus collections, collectors, and dealers in works of art came into being and, consequently, alongside the artists, also the forgers. Phaedrus (V, 1) recalls the false signatures affixed to inferior products in order to pass them off as the work of great masters. But in this period and throughout the ancient world the forged art object does not have such a blatant character of fraud as later, owing to the constant and widespread use of copies, replicas, and reworkings of famous works of art. Nor is it even in the Renaissance that one can speak of true forgeries properly so called, even when artists strove to produce "ancient" works: they did not intend to deceive, but intended only to insert themselves into the culture of the ancient world as its direct continuators, as individuals belonging to the same civilization. They believed they were identifying their world with the ancient world, not repeating or copying it. The forgery and the forger have not and do not wish to have any autonomy or independence, whereas the artists of the Renaissance and their works had, and were conscious of having, both. True forgeries begin with Neoclassicism and with Romanticism, when taste dons the polemical mantle and crowns itself with rationalism. First the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, then the purist infatuation, afterwards the fashion for the primitives, and finally the immoderate collecting mania feed the flame of the various workshops of forgeries.
The most sensational forgeries, both for the number of products sold and for the quality of the persons deceived, are undoubtedly those of Guerra, the adventurer who reproduced, or believed he reproduced, the paintings of the dead cities of Campania. They were acquired by the principal museums of Europe; the Kircheriano alone possessed 70 of them: but the fraud was soon discovered and even gave rise to diplomatic incidents between the Bourbon court and the Holy See, since Guerra resided in Rome. Two examples of these forgeries have today been recognized in two small paintings of the Museo Nazionale Romano. Another famous forgery is the Polyhymnia of the Museum of Cortona, an encaustic painting on slate: it cannot be excluded, however, that in the artist's intention there was no idea of committing a forgery, but rather the desire to compete with the ancients, and that it was only archaeological scholarship that made a blunder and then justified itself by casting the blame for its own error on the presumed wicked intention of the artist. True forgeries properly so called, on the other hand, are all those produced by the workshops of Roman sculptors of the 18th and 19th centuries which filled so many museums with their products: foremost among these Cavaceppi. But their forgeries were refined, since in almost every case it was a matter of an ancient fragment around which the artist's imagination, interpreting it, reconstructed a figure or an object which, in his view, could have been the ancient one. The most blatant forgeries, on the other hand, occurred in the field of small bronze figures, coins, and gems, where forgery was technically easier. Forgeries of a different character, then, are those of Dossena, since the sculptor created what criticism desired, what criticism lacked in order to document a passage, a transition between two phases. But the "forgeries" were signed with the artist's name, and therefore one should not speak of forgeries but of learned reconstructions, of exercises in archaic languages.
The search for the primitives and subsequently for all paintings by illustrious artists in general gave rise to a series of forgeries. The primitives were the first to experience the competition of forgers, who became skilled also in reproducing craquelures, in artificially aging woods, in using old canvases and woods, in producing on the colors those alterations that time normally produces; subsequently there were forgeries of all the most sought-after artists. In this field forgeries are of two kinds. Either the painting is completely false, that is, it is a modern work composed in the style of the chosen painter, perhaps using old wood or canvas; or else it is an ancient painting, the work of a workshop, mostly of inferior quality, doctored in such a way as to be attributable to some commercially more profitable artist and often provided with some authoritative authentication made in more or less good faith. But by now modern technique is capable of unmasking these forgeries with its means—chemical analyses of the colors, radiographic and ultraviolet examinations, photographic examinations under raking light—and the proof of this is that the memoirs of antiquarians are beginning to be in fashion, in which they recount some of their most sensational adventures or reveal some of their tricks: an evident sign that they no longer have any commercial value.
In this sense, too, today's refined restoration technique has made a notable contribution in demanding the most absolute respect for the original work, even in the integrations of lacunae, which, once the unity of the work of art has been re-established, must always be perfectly recognizable. - See plates LXV-LXVI.
Bibliography2 works
Michelangelo Cagnino de Azevedo