ARTISTIC FORGERIES. — When the Romans, having conquered Greece, became enthusiastic about its civilization and sought to acquire its most refined products, artistic forgeries began. Collections, collectors, and art dealers emerged, and alongside artists, forgers also appeared. Phaedrus (v. R) recalls false signatures affixed to inferior works to pass them off as those of great masters. However, in this period and throughout the ancient world, the forged art object did not have such an obvious connotation of deception as it later did, due to the constant and widespread use of copies, replicas, and reinterpretations of famous works of art. Nor can the Renaissance be considered a period of true forgeries, even when artists strove to produce works “of antiquity”: they did not intend to deceive but rather 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 own world with the ancient world, not merely repeating or copying II. Forgery and the forger had—and wanted to have—no autonomy or independence, whereas Renaissance artists and their works did possess and were conscious of possessing both.
True forgeries began with Neoclassicism and Romanticism, when taste donned a polemical mantle and crowned itself with rationalism. First came the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, then the purist infatuation, followed by the fashion for primitives, and finally the unbridled acquisitive passions that fueled the flames of various forgery workshops.
The most sensational forgeries, in terms of the number of works sold and the quality of the people deceived, are undoubtedly those of Guerra, the adventurer who reproduced—or claimed to reproduce—the paintings from the buried cities of Campania. They were purchased by major European museums; the Kircherian alone possessed seventy. But the fraud was soon exposed, even leading 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 National Roman Museum.
Another famous forgery is the *Polymnia* in the Museum of Cortona, a painting in encaustic on slate. However, it cannot be ruled out that the artist had no intention of committing a forgery but rather sought to compete with the ancients, and it was only archaeological science that erred and then justified itself by shifting blame for its mistake onto the supposed intentional deception of the artist.
True forgeries, however, are all those produced by the workshops of Roman sculptors in the 18th and 19th centuries, which filled many museums with their works—first among them Cavaceppi. Their forgeries were sophisticated, as in nearly all cases they involved an ancient fragment around which the artist’s imagination, interpreting it, reconstructed a figure or object that, in their view, could have been the original. The most blatant forgeries, however, appeared in the field of small bronze figurines, coins, and gems, where technical fraud was easier.
Forgeries of a different character are those of Dossena, since the sculptor created what criticism desired, what it lacked to document a transition between two phases. But the forgeries were signed with the artist’s name, so it is not a matter of forgeries per se but rather of gifted reconstructions or exercises in archaic styles.
The search for primitives, followed by that for works by illustrious artists in general, gave rise to a series of forgeries. The primitives were the first to inspire competition among forgers, who became skilled in reproducing craquelure, artificially aging wood, warping old canvases and panels, and producing alterations in colors that normally result from time. Subsequently, forgeries of all the most sought-after artists emerged. In this field, forgeries fall into two categories. Either the painting is entirely false—that is, a modern work composed in the style of the chosen artist, perhaps using old wood or canvas—or it is an ancient painting, usually a workshop piece of inferior quality, doctored to be attributed to some commercially more profitable artist and often furnished with an authoritative (more or less genuine) authentication. Modern techniques, however, can now expose these forgeries through chemical analysis of pigments, ultraviolet radiographic examinations, photographic and raking-light studies, and the fact that memoirs by antiquarians—recounting their most sensational adventures or revealing some of their tricks—are now fashionable is proof that such forgeries no longer have any commercial value.
In this sense, even today’s refined restoration techniques have made a significant contribution by insisting on the absolute respect for the original work, even in the integration of losses, which, once the unity of the artwork is restored, must always be perfectly recognizable.
— See pls. LXV–LXVI.