Welcome sign in sign up. The existence of a market for any kind of valuable object almost always encourages the production of counterfeits. It happens with drugs, banknotes, and designer handbags. It also happens with works of art. But whereas counterfeiting banknotes or other documents has always been considered a crime, attitudes toward art forgery have changed greatly over time, as Jonathon Keats and Thierry Lenain explain in their recent books. Keats provides a succinct, intelligent, and very readable summary of the subject, concentrating on some of the most famous modern art forgers, while Lenain, in a notably learned and wide-ranging text, goes into more detail and is more concerned with the broader implications of his topic.
It is often said that art forgery has existed as long as the demand for works of art, but this is not strictly true. There is no clear evidence that art forgeries as such existed in the ancient world. Signatures became much more common in the fifteenth century, frequently appearing on works other than religious images, as the names of individual artists became more widely known and their works admired, followed gradually by the formation of private collections.
Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession [Thierry Lenain] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. With the recent advent of technologies. Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Thierry Lenain is professor of art theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the author of Monkey Painting, also.
As one would expect, it was from this period that the first cases of art forgery were reported. Surprisingly, there is little suggestion in their texts that the practice was in any way to be deplored, let alone was criminal, except in a few cases involving the illicit copying of prints under copyright. According to these accounts, the artists responsible for forgery were in every instance highly talented.
These cases were evidently recounted by Vasari because they were indicative of supreme artistic skill. During that period, too, the distinction between an autograph work and one produced with the help of assistants, which now seems so important, was not regarded as of much significance; and some artists, such as Titian, made a good living out of providing replicas of their most popular paintings, often made in large part by assistants.
Thus there could have been little demand for forged paintings, especially since the resale of the work of a famous artist was a rare event, making the problem of establishing a convincing provenance particularly difficult. The one exception involved ancient art.
But the imitation of classical art was a widely shared goal among artists, especially in the circle of Raphael; and it is often hard to make a clear distinction between instances of emulation, pastiche, and outright forgery. This is particularly true of the widespread practice among leading goldsmiths and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of making imitations of ancient coins usually considered at the time as medals.
These included more or less accurate replicas, but more admired were entirely invented coins, with images of famous figures of antiquity such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Sappho. Some unsophisticated collectors certainly believed that these productions were genuine antiquities. But the craftsmen who produced them were widely praised for having done so. Their names were recorded in Renaissance books on ancient medals, and leading scholars advised them about features such as inscriptions. Since ancient coins are today regarded as an important source of historical knowledge, the idea of antiquarians assisting in the production of fake historical evidence now seems very strange.
But at the time their significance was interpreted differently. Coins were valued primarily for their portraits, for the allegorical figures on the reverse sides, which were widely used by Italian artists in their own works, and for samples of ancient inscriptions. The pseudo-antique coins seem to have been admired for their workmanship, but also, of course, for the portraits, because during the Renaissance there was an intense interest in likenesses of famous historical figures, and when real ones did not exist it was considered entirely acceptable to invent them.
The collection of painted portraits of historical figures assembled by the historian Paolo Giovio at Como, which was famous throughout Europe, included many invented images. This relaxed attitude toward ancient coins extended to ancient sculpture, the one type of art for which there was an active market. Here, if anywhere, one might want to speak of forgery, were it not for the fact that collectors were accustomed to having their statues so radically restored that their original, and almost invariably fragmentary, character was entirely obscured.
From a modern viewpoint it is difficult to see much distinction between a Renaissance or Baroque sculptor transforming a damaged torso, or a collection of fragments of different objects, into a complete statue and the same sculptor producing an entirely new statue in a classical style.
The modern attitude toward forgery seems then to involve a number of features, some of which only gradually developed late in the Renaissance or after. One is the belief that works of art of all periods have a certain intrinsic value and that their historical and stylistic character should be respected, including, to some degree at least, the inevitable changes wrought by time.
This belief was not held by early modern collectors of ancient art, or, for that matter, by church authorities and others who commissioned new versions of the images of the Madonna attributed to Saint Luke. Another requirement is the existence of an active art market. Finally, there has to be some widely accepted mechanism for determining the authenticity of the objects bought and sold in that market.
Like many other scholars, Lenain singles out the seventeenth-century Roman physician and writer on art Giulio Mancini as a pioneer in the discussion of what was later called connoisseurship, concentrating on his treatment of the expertise required to distinguish between an original and a copy.
Mancini recommended that collectors should try to acquire at least a basic level of such expertise, and suggested ways in which they could do so. It is important to bear in mind, however, that this expertise did not cover the ability to identify the authors of works of art of the past. Mancini did not dissent from the conventional belief that the final authorities in all such matters were practicing artists, and this remained the general view until the nineteenth century.
Such artists certainly possessed a degree of knowledge beyond that of almost every amateur, simply because they knew how to paint or carve, and had studied by copying the works of others. But it is evident from inventories and sale catalogs that even in the late eighteenth century attributions were often highly optimistic and unreliable. This is not surprising, given the still primitive knowledge of art history and the absence of photographs and other reproductions. It is usually impossible to say whether copies or pastiches from that period, which survive in great numbers, were made as forgeries or in good faith.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there is no doubt about the existence of art forgery as a significant phenomenon. It coincided with the emergence of professional connoisseurs, who claimed a particular expertise in identifying the authors of works of art, and, inevitably, in the detection of forgeries. Guy Isnard, a police official, curating an exhibition of fakes in Paris, Photo by Robert Cohen for Time-Life.
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