Article Renaissance Forgeries
A sketch of Cupid by Michelangelo. It’s believed he based his phony antique sculpture of Cupid on this drawing. Collecting classical artifacts became all the rage during the Renaissance. Wealthy merchants and princes scrambled to build magnificent collections of Greek and Roman statues and sculptures. Scholars pored over ancient manuscripts that had been lost to Europeans for centuries.
Much of this activity represented genuine excitement at the rediscovery of lost knowledge and art. But some of the activity was driven by the fact that the acquisition of classical artifacts had simply become the new fad, the new way of displaying power and status. Instead of collecting the bones and body parts of saints, towns and wealthy rulers now collected fragments of the ancient world. And just as with the relic trade, demand far outstripped supply. Therefore, the forgers once again stepped in to fill the gap.
But this time there was a difference. It was not very important if the relic sitting in the local church actually was or was not the thigh-bone of St. Peter, as long as people believed that it was performing miracles. By contrast, it did make a difference if a classical artifact was an ancient original or a modern copy (though good copies were valued in their own right).
The flood of classical fakes placed scholars on their guard. It put them under pressure to improve their critical skills in order to be able to separate the authentic from the inauthentic. In this sense, forgery paradoxically played a prominent role in promoting scholarly inquiry (and it continues to play this role up to the present day).
Curiously, the greatest scholars and artists often simultaneously turned out to be the most notorious forgers. During the fifteenth century a high church official named Giovanni Nanni (a.k.a. Annius) produced elaborate ancient texts and inscriptions showing that his native town of Viterbo had been an important center of culture during the Etruscan period. All of his texts were soon proven to be fakes. But at the same time Annius articulated much of the methodology that lay the groundwork for the development of more rigorous historical scholarship. So he is remembered as a father of critical tradition, as well as a subverter of it.
In 1583 Carlo Sigonio, one of the most respected scholars of his day, announced that he had found a new complete work by Cicero, De Consolatione. Only small fragments of this work had ever been found before. But rival scholars were quick to reject it as a fraud, pointing out that its language contained anachronistic phrases and mannerisms. Apparently Sigonio created the work simply to display his mastery of Ciceronian scholarship.
The most famous case of Renaissance art fraud involved the young Michelangelo. In 1496 he sculpted a sleeping cupid which he (or an accomplice) buried in acidic earth to give it an appearance of great age. The plan was to pass it off as an antiquity, since it would fetch a higher price that way. The artificially aged sculpture was then sold through a dealer to Cardinal Raffaello Riario of San Giorgio. Eventually the Cardinal learned of the forgery, and he demanded his money back from the dealer. But the Cardinal wasn’t mad at Michelangelo. In fact, he allowed him to keep his percentage of the sale. Everyone was so impressed by Michelangelo’s obvious talent, that they all simply overlooked his youthful indiscretion.
Michelangelo’s cupid came into the possession of the d’Este collection in Mantua, where it was reportedly displayed side by side with a genuine antique sleeping cupid. But by the seventeenth century the cupid was lost and never found again. It would undoubtedly command an imposing price today as a genuine Michelangelo fake.
References
- McCuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
- Jones, Mark, with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker (eds.). Fake? The Art of Deception. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
- Rubinstein, Ruth. (1986). Michelangelo’s Lost Sleeping Cupid and Fetti’s Vertumnus and Pomona. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 49: 257-259.
