ARTISTIC FALSIFICATIONS. — When the Romans, having conquered Greece, became enthusiastic about its civilization and sought to acquire its most refined products, the f. began. Collections, collectors, and dealers in works of art thus began to appear and, alongside artists, therefore also 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 did not have such an openly fraudulent character as it would later acquire, owing to the constant and widespread use of copies, replicas, and reworkings of celebrated works of art. Nor can one speak of genuine forgeries in the Renaissance, even when artists endeavored to produce «ancient» works: they did not intend to deceive, but merely sought to insert themselves into the culture of the ancient world as its direct continuators, as individuals belonging to the same civilization. They believed that they were identifying their own world with the ancient world, not repeating or copying II. The forgery and the forger possess, and do not wish to possess, any autonomy or independence, whereas Renaissance artists and their works possessed both and were conscious of possessing them. Genuine forgeries began with Neoclassicism and Romanticism, when taste donned a polemical mantle and crowned itself with rationalism. First the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, then the purist infatuation, subsequently the fashion for primitive artists, and finally the immoderate passion for collecting fed the flames of the various forgers’ workshops.
The most sensational forgeries, both in the number of products sold and in the quality of the people deceived, were undoubtedly those of Guerra, the adventurer who reproduced, or believed he reproduced, the paintings of the dead cities of Campania. They were purchased by the principal museums of Europe; the Kircherian Museum alone possessed seventy. But the fraud was soon uncovered and also gave rise to diplomatic incidents between the Bourbon court and the Holy See, since Guerra resided in Rome. Two examples of these forgeries have now been identified in two small paintings in the Museo nazionale romano. Another celebrated forgery is the Polymnia in the Museum of Cortona, an encaustic painting on slate. It cannot, however, be ruled out that the artist had no intention of committing a forgery, but rather wished to compete with the ancients, and that it was archaeological scholarship alone which was misled and subsequently justified itself by placing the blame for its error on the artist’s presumed evil intention. Genuine forgeries, on the other hand, are all those produced by the workshops of Roman sculptors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which filled so many museums with their products: foremost among them was Cavaceppi. Yet their forgeries were sophisticated, since in almost every case they consisted of an ancient fragment around which the artist’s imagination, interpreting it, recreated a figure or object that, in his view, might have been the ancient one. The most blatant forgeries, by contrast, occurred in the field of bronze figurines, coins, and gems, where f. was technically easier. Different in character are the forgeries of Dossena, since the sculptor created what criticism desired, what criticism lacked in order to document a stage or a transition between two phases. But the «forgeries» were signed with the artist’s name; therefore, they should not have been called forgeries, but learned reconstructions, exercises in archaic languages.
The search for primitive artists, and subsequently for paintings by illustrious artists in general, gave rise to a series of f. Primitive artists were the first to experience competition from forgers, who also became skilled at reproducing cracquelures, artificially aging wood, using old canvases and wood, and producing on the colors the alterations normally caused by time. Subsequently, forgeries of all the most sought-after artists appeared. In this field, forgeries are of two kinds. Either the painting is entirely false—that is, a modern work composed in the style of the chosen painter, perhaps using ancient wood or canvas—or it is an ancient painting, generally a workshop production of inferior quality, altered so that it could be attributed to an artist who was more profitable commercially and often provided with some authoritative certificate of authenticity, issued in more or less good faith. Modern technique, however, is now able to unmask these forgeries by its means—chemical analyses of the pigments, radiographic examinations and ultraviolet-ray tests, and photographic examinations in raking light. Proof of this is that the memoirs of antiquarians are beginning to become fashionable, recounting some of their most sensational adventures or revealing one or another of their tricks: clear evidence that they no longer possess any commercial value.
In this sense, the refined modern technique of restoration has also made a notable contribution by insisting on the most absolute respect for the original work, even in the integration of lacunae, which, once the unity of the work of art has been restored, must always remain perfectly recognizable. — Vedi tavv. LXV-LXVI.