"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
The
previous two Moments
in Art dealt
with the fake terracotta busts created by Giavanni Bastianini
(1830-1868) and the great brouhahas which erupted when he was exposed
as the creator of these supposed Quattrocento masterpieces.
Terracotta
was not Bastianini’s only medium. Some of his best forgeries
were in marble, and others were fashioned from wood.
Closely
related to limestone, marble varies greatly from quarry to quarry
and, with modern laboratory procedures, the origin of a marble piece
can be traced as accurately as a typewriter can be identified by its
keys. A hundred years ago the typing of marble was not so far
advanced, but even so, Bastianini had to be careful to use a variety
that would not arouse suspicion because of general characteristics.
He also had to age it carefully.
Freshly
quarried marble has a glistening freshness the forger cannot ignore.
The early Greeks did not like this freshness; perhaps it made the
statue look too glitzy and artificial.
Since the golden age of Attica, methods of artificially aging the
appearance of marble have been part of the sculptor's discipline.
Marble can be immersed in urine or in corrosive ashes; hung in a
smokehouse; buried in sour earth (as Michelangelo did with his
Cupid);
washed with a solution of copper, iron, or zinc sulfate; or treated
in other ways. A washing with weak green vitriol (from iron sulfate)
penetrates so deep that even laboratory observers have been deceived.
The
forger may vary the strengths of his solutions and may incorporate
into them coloring agents to impart a variegated surface and make his
work appear even more authentic.
Painters
can sometimes mask the age of their fakes by using old canvas from
the period and making paints by ancient methods. A forger of
documents will search for papers which are as old as the bogus
document is supposed to be; a frequent source is the blank end pages
from old books.
In
overcoming problems of ageing, a sculptor can't take an old piece of
marble – like a painter of forgeries can take an old painting
and scrape away an image – and cut away a lot of it because the
exposed marble then becomes shiny new.
One
of Bastianini's better pieces was a statuette, Giovanna
Albizzi,
which he made from worm-eaten wood glued and bolted and rough shaped
into a female form by a joiner. After completing the figure,
Bastianini covered it with gesso paste and gilded it in the
sixteenth-century manner. Again it went north, where a French
collector paid a substantial sum to buy it.
Even
more beautiful was La
Chanteuse Florentine [The Florentine Singer].
Dressed in elegant floor length robes, she was a graceful lady. You
can hear her singing a nativity carol from the music she is holding.
The subject may have been inspired by a Domenico Ghirlandaio fresco.
The
piece was acquired by a French friend of the composer Giacomo
Rossini. Rossini was so taken with the statuette that he wrote, “It
pleases me to declare that this adorable statuette. . .does not sing
my cavatina Di
Tanti Palpiti,
which made Venetians happy in 1813; she hums a melody of the
celebrated composer Ludrone, who was born in Padua in 1500; that
means (thank God) that she does not sing the seductive music of the
future.”
Two
days later the friend sold La
Chanteurse Florentine as
a work of the fifteenth century to the fabled French collector
Edouard André, and she went into the Jacquemart-André
Museum, as did the letter, and they were displayed together.
When
Paul Dubois, who was a sculptor and director of the Ecole
des Beaux Arts and
an authority on early Italian Renaissance sculpture, declared that La
Chanteuse Florentine was
so completely in the spirit of the Quattrocento that no
nineteenth-century artist could have done it, everyone believed him.
Everyone wanted to.
The
statuette aroused pangs of covetousness in another French collector,
Edmond Bonnaffe. Since the subject was Florentine (and he probably
had discussed the piece with its owner) he wrote a plaintive letter
to Freppa, Bastianini’s Fagan:
“I
should like to inquire, dear sir, whether you might indicate to me an
interesting terracotta bust of a young man or a young lady, in short
a pleasing subject. I need not stress
I am looking for something beautiful by the hand of an artist of the
Quattrocento. I should be most grateful if you could give me details
of any such bust you may know of, together with its price. A
terracotta statuette in the style of the figure brought to Paris by
M. Castallani about forty centimeters high, would also be most
acceptable, providing the subject were interesting and the statuette
in a fine state of preservation.”
Hard
as it would have been for anyone in Paris then to have believed that
either statue was fake, no one would have believed that Benivieni,
which I wrote about in Part 1 of this series on the Renaissance
Impersonator, and La
Chanteuse Florentine,
which hit Paris at the same time, were produced by the same person.
In
the weeks following Bastianini's death, more of the truth about the
sculptor, his various works, and the people who had manipulated him
or made bags of money selling and reselling his art slowly came out.
What
do you do when you discover you’ve been duped by forged art?
The
Victoria and Albert Museum simply moved the Bastianini pieces
acquired at considerable expense into the room for moderns and
continued to purchase his works, which they exhibited as
nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance sculpture.
In
1922 Paris's original Benevieni
and London's Baron
von Jenison,
another Bastianini marble done about the same time, were brought
together for the first time in a False or True exhibition shown in
Europe and the United States. Expert and layman alike could see that
both works were by the same hand, even though the two busts were of
men from different periods and places.
The
exhibit was another proof that a copyist and a forger functions in
his own culture, in an orbit of fashion which is not the same as it
was a year before or will be a year hence. Subconsciously, the
imitator emphasizes qualities currently esteemed and inevitably
neglects and dilutes other aspects that his culture cares little
about. Because experts, too, are often prisoners of these same
forces, they may not recognize the disparity between genuine and
imitation today – but they will tomorrow. Since tomorrow is
already here for yesterday's forgeries, it's easier for us to spot
them.
Another
phenomenon haunts most forgers. The faker, historically, often
succeeds with his first good copy, but as his works begin to appear
here and there they become susceptible to comparison with one
another. When these comparisons start, the creator's idiosyncrasies
are discovered, and once they are known, they are likely to be
spotted in other works which until then have gone unassociated.
Even
if Freppa hadn't blown the whistle, eventually the fakery would have
been detected, if not the faker.
There
are two other patterns to this three-part story which are frequently
duplicated in the lives of other forgers and fakery rings.
First,
Bastianini was not the person who incised the inscription Benvieni
into the marble bust. It may not have been Freppa. All too often a
creator of fakes, who may be creating something “in the style
of,” is manipulated by unscrupulous dealers. At first he may
not know what they are doing, or what is being done to his work –
the addition of signatures, the creation of attributions, the
falsification of provenances. But once caught in such a situation,
it is difficult for the exploited artist to extricate himself. (Or he
may not want to.)
The
other, a forger or a dealer who is misused, or not appreciated,
frequently wants to have the record straight, not because of any
great sudden wash of honesty, but a hunger for recognition – or
a need for retribution.
As
I have written about several times in my out-of-print book The
Fabulous Frauds, Fascinating Tales of Great Art Forgeries,
whenever there is a falling out – among forgers and dealers or
between a forger and a victim – there is going to be scandal –
in the case of Mark Hofmann and his Mormon papers forgeries, even
murder!
Lawrence Jeppson is an art consultant, organizer and curator of art exhibitions, writer, editor
and publisher, lecturer, art historian, and appraiser. He is America's leading authority on
modern, handwoven French tapestries. He is expert on the works of William Henry Clapp, Nat
Leeb, Tsing-fang Chen, and several French artists.
He is founding president of the non-profit Mathieu Matégot Foundation for Contemporary
Tapestry, whose purview encompasses all 20th-century tapestry, an interest that traces back to
1948. For many years he represented the Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie and
Arelis in America.
Through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the American Federation of
Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and his own Art Circuit Services he has been a contributor to
or organizer of more than 200 art exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Taiwan.
He owns AcroEditions, which publishes and/or distributes multiple-original art. He was co-founder and artistic director of Collectors' Investment Fund.
He is the director of the Spring Arts Foundation; Utah Cultural Arts Foundation, and the Fine
Arts Legacy Foundation
Lawrence is an early-in-the-month home teacher, whose beat is by elevator. In addition, he has spent the past six years hosting and promoting reunions of the missionaries who served in the French Mission (France, Belgium, and Switzerland) during the decade after WWII.