IMITATION, PLAGIARISM AND FAKING
The artists’ passion for the antique--Brunelleschi, Donatello and
their followers--Florence, the School of Padua, Venice--
Imitation, plagiarism and faking--The plaquettes and their
curious transformations of some Greek and Roman originals--The
character of the imitations and that of the intended victims.
There is no occasion here to lose oneself in arguments as to whether
the artist was the primal cause of the awakening of the taste for the
antique, or whether it was a mere synthetic translation of a sentiment
already awakened through complex causes, the main one being, perhaps,
classic literature. Classicism, lately developed into an entirely pagan
æsthetic sentiment, a combination of Philhellenic and Latin tendencies,
may as well have influenced art as life in general--a sentiment
that at the moment of its maturity aroused anathematic protest from
Savonarola and a momentary reaction of pietism. However, the preaching
of the friar and his colossal bonfire of art treasures in Piazza della
Signoria were mere incidents in the course of Florentine tendencies of
art. The _Piagnoni_ in Florence may have converted Botticelli and a
few other artists, but the pagan sentiment was not dispelled. For the
artist of the last part of the XVth century San Giorgio and Perseus
were, if not identical, to be treated with the same artistic sentiment.
The real evolution, in our opinion, begins with Brunelleschi and
Donatello. In the year 1404 these two artists undertook a journey
to Rome. For the progress of art this is a memorable date. The real
influence of Greek and Roman art on the artistic movement immediately
preceding the Renaissance begins at that date. It is undeniable that
even before this time mythological subjects had become familiar to both
painters and sculptors, artists preceding Donatello and Brunelleschi,
such as Piero di Giovanni Tedesco, Nicolo di Piero Lamberti (called
_il Pela_) and even Nanni and Antonio di Banco, show slight traces of
Roman art at times--even to the way of working the marble, as in
the ornaments of the north door of the Duomo in Florence, by Giovanni
Tedesco--but they are faint and uncertain traits, leaving one
undecided whether they be attributable to Roman influence or a mere
inheritance from the Romanesque blunt-edged way of working marble.
The years spent in Rome by Donatello and Brunelleschi seem to have
moulded the style of these two artists entirely anew, particularly
that of the former. The citizens of Rome were more or less surprised
at the persistency with which the two artists endeavoured to unearth
fragments of old statues, and supposing them to be animated by a mere
mercenary hope, that of finding some treasure, they called the two
students _quelli del tesoro_ (treasure-seekers). It is undeniably true
that however profitable their search for old coins and marble relics,
their copies and study of ancient art were in their sum total more
valuable than the solid gold they brought back with them to Florence.
The results are plainly visible in Brunelleschi’s architecture and
Donatello’s sculpture, and the influence that their art exercised over
their contemporaries and followers.
As we have said, after his sojourn in Rome, Donatello, particularly,
seems to have immersed his art in a bath of past paganism. His art is
no fakery, nor is it sheer plagiarism of the antique, but it is all
permeated with Greek and Roman reminiscences, and comes at times so
close to the Græco-Roman art that it misleads connoisseurs. Speaking
of Donatello’s art Louis Courajod, a well-known connoisseur, observes:
“He entered so deeply into the spirit of antiquity, that some of his
restorations of statues are very puzzling, and it is difficult to
distinguish his handiwork from that of the original.”
In fact the famous horse’s head of the Naples Museum was catalogued
as a Greek bronze before it was recently attributed to Donatello or
his school. No one can fail to draw a comparison between Donatello’s
_puttino_ and the “Infant with the Goose,” a typical example of
Græco-Roman art.
One of the first to be affected by the new sentiment in art was Lorenzo
Ghiberti. As a matter of fact Ghiberti not only became enamoured of the
antique, but was seized by the passion of collecting the best antiques
in marble and bronze. You may be sure that collectors of this calibre,
unlike the Roman samples, talked very little of patina and a great
deal of form, that their enthusiasm was of a higher alloy even than
that of present-day collectors, who are rarely artists or even real
lovers of art. Polycletus and Lysippus were Ghiberti’s idols, and Greek
art his worship; for the era of Imperial Rome he had no enthusiasm.
His cult for the Greek went so far as to induce him to reckon time by
the Olympiads in his chronology. Instead of telling us that a certain
artist died when Martin V was pope, or in the year so and so, Ghiberti
states amazingly that the event took place in the 438th Olympiad! It
is not surprising that an artist like Ghiberti, and such a lover of
Greek art as he was, should be able to classify Greek art at sight, to
discriminate it from dubious Roman products and all the art that so
closely resembles certain Greek periods.
That the worship of pagan art was practised by artists with no risk
to themselves may be explained by the circumstance that the time of
religious intolerance had passed. Intolerance, comprehensible perhaps
in the early times of Constantine, when it was a crime for an artist to
go to the forms of the past, had gradually sunk into tradition by the
dawn of the new era which paved the way to the Renaissance in art and
to humanistic tendencies, the most tolerant and unprejudiced period of
past civilization.
Lovers of art in this period appear to possess a certain refinement of
feeling that the Romans did not have, they stand more as friends to
the artist, esteem him more, and thus their pursuit has a wider scope.
Even Ghiberti, with all the restrictions placed on his taste by his
infatuation for the antique, was, according to Vasari who describes his
collection, no narrow specialist in the so much praised modern meaning
of the word, namely, a collector who may be useful to the history of
art and to knowledge at large, but who does not as a rule possess a
spark of love for art or artistic feeling.
As is often the case to-day, the heirs of these old collectors were
at times more greedy for money than a reputation for art. Many fine
collections were scattered to the four winds, which was also the
fate meted out to Ghiberti’s collection by his relatives and heirs.
Fortunately a few pieces of this stupendous collection have been saved:
a fine torso of a Satyr can now be seen in the Uffizi. There are other
pieces too that have come down to us, but the finest works, those
attributed to Polycletus, among them a rare ornamented vase, are now
lost.
The new artistic feeling perpetuated itself in architecture from
Brunelleschi to Alberti. The latter built for Malatesta what purported
to be a church, but which is in fact nothing but a temple to Love,
which the tyrant of Rimini erected and dedicated to the memory of
his lady-love, Isotta Atti. The revolution in sculpture effected
by Donatello seems to be felt in Padua and Venice. Imitations of
all sorts, and probably faked antiques, date from this time. It is
difficult to decide whether Donatello’s genuine pagan sentiment, his
second artistic nature, was solely due to his passion or to a desire
to accommodate the general taste for the antique; Italian artists are
far too versatile. However that may be, he was no faker; the art of
the faker flourished when imitators had lost all artistic personality,
becoming mere craftsmen catering as usual to a momentary mania. Then
was the time one saw Filarete indulging in most absurd medals and
portraits of dubious, very dubious, historical correctness; Riccio in
Padua fabricating and flooding the market with charming little bronzes
in which the imitation is so evident that it brings up the question as
to what the art of Andrea Briesco (called _il Riccio_) might have been,
had he chanced to be born at another epoch. Vellano also alternates
fine pieces of work with little bronzes that must have been in great
vogue with collectors of antiques. It is to be noted that the mania
is not confined to Italy, it takes that country by storm because of
its tremendous artistic activity and the fact that in art it is the
foremost country of the time; but others were affected too. France
is the first as being the nearest tributary to Italian supremacy in
art. There are many examples of what we have said, but perhaps one of
the most eloquent is the decoration of the castle of Gaillon, where
there are some medallions with portraits of Roman emperors of a most
mystifying character. Though the work of Italians of the end of the
Quattrocento they were classified as antique (_antiqualles_) only a few
years later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
An evident proof that Quattrocento imitations were not always directed
by artistic fancy, but rather by the love of gain by means of fraud and
fakery, is given by the fact that some of the statuettes imitating the
antique were cast with broken limbs.
The Ambras collection of Vienna has one of these curious specimens--a
charming figure, a female nude. This piece has evidently been cast
without arms, the clay model having been mutilated before the form
was taken for the cast. In the Prado of Madrid there is also a bronze
statue of the Renaissance, possibly a cast from the antique, the
peculiarity of which is that the arms have been added afterwards, as
though in restoration. The metal of the arms is of a different alloy
and the modelling of these parts purports to be of a much later date
than the rest of the statue.
The first pieces to show a positive character of fakery are imitations
of old coins and medals. Then small bronzes called _plaquettes_, often
_pastiches_ of antique models, when not actually reproductions from old
cameos.
The Renaissance has also produced many bronze statuettes that seem to
have had no other purpose than to take in the amateur--to gratify his
demand for antiques by launching spurious products upon the market.
The artists responsible for them represent what might be styled the
aristocracy of fakers; there is nothing banal about them, their work is
generally good, so much so that these imitations have now acquired a
value _per se_.
Antonio Pollaiolo, the Florentine sculptor, is one of the most charming
imitators of the antique. The Flute Player of the National Museum
of Florence is perhaps one of the most convincing examples of this
statement. Hercules and Antæus is also a remarkable work by this
artist, though the other is superior on account of its simplicity.
Of the Flute Player there are copies of the same period in the Cluny
Museum and at Avignon. Curiously enough this statuette tempted even the
pencil of Raphael, who reproduced it in a sketch-book now kept in the
Academy of Venice.
As soon as he had left the goldsmith’s shop, Andrea del Verrocchio
started the early period of his activity in his new career as a
sculptor, and made his way, according to Vasari, by casting small
figures in bronze. We know very little of these small statuettes of
Verrocchio’s, beyond attribution, but, Vasari says, Verrocchio was
tempted to make them while in Rome, because he saw how appreciated
were antique statuettes, so much so that even fragments fetched fancy
prices. Being an excellent craftsman with the chisel, and skilled
in the casting of metals, Verrocchio would seem to have been fully
equipped for catering to the demand of the amateurs of his time.
Vellano, in his imitations of the antique, seems at times to have even
been tempted to counterfeit Egyptian art. His art in imitating is
eclectic and most versatile.
[Illustration: IMITATIONS OF THE ANTIQUE.
By Moderno, XVIth Century.]
Andrea Briesco seems to possess the brusque touch of some antique
sculptors combined with the mania of Roman foppishness in
over-draping his statuettes. They are invariably arrayed in gorgeous
consular armour, elaborate togas, imperial sandals, and have, as a
remarkable contrast, wild, vulgar faces in complete disharmony with
the rich decoration of the costumes. However, when this artist models
horses or simple nude figures he gets closer to the originals and is
evidently an excellent and dangerous imitator. The bronzes of the
Paduan school that may, with more or less certainty, be attributed to
Riccio, are endless and in some of them the intention of faking is
evident.
Jacopo Sansovino, the presumed author of the bronze statuette of
Meleager of the Pourtales collection in Berlin, does not seem to take
the trouble to disguise the origin of his plagium.
Michelangelo was too great a personality as an artist and too highly
gifted to be tempted to hide his genius and waste his fine energies on
imitation of the antique. Yet the story of his Sleeping Cupid, sold in
Rome as an antique, is very instructive. Though well known it serves
admirably to illustrate the character of the amateurs contemporary to
the great sculptor. The anecdote casts a certain justified suspicion
that the collectors of the Renaissance and early sixteenth century must
have been duped on a larger scale than we are led to suppose from the
scanty information we possess on the subject.
Vasari informs us that Michelangelo sculptured from a piece of marble
a life-sized sleeping Cupid, that in this work he had imitated the
antique to a surprising extent; so much so that when the work was shown
to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici the latter advised the sculptor
to send the work to Rome and sell it as an antique, as “by this means
he could obtain a far better price.” According to Vasari, the Cupid,
marvellously arranged and coloured like an old piece of sculpture, was
taken to Rome, buried in a vineyard and then “discovered” and sold as
an antique to Cardinal San Giorgio, who paid 200 ducats for the work (a
ducat was worth about 9s.). Vasari adds that the person who had acted
as go-between in the affair tried to cheat Michelangelo by saying
that the Cardinal had only paid him 30 _scudi_ (a scudi was worth
about 4s.), and he then comments on the Cardinal’s poor taste in not
giving the Cupid due consideration after he had discovered that it was
modern. He says: “Not recognizing the merit of the work, which consists
in perfection, wherein the moderns are as good as the ancients,”
the Cardinal did not know how lucky he was to own a genuine work by
Michelangelo in the place of heaven knows what poor product of some
modest master of antiquity.
Condivi repeats the story, which has given ample food for popular fancy
and folklore, adding that the irate Cardinal caused the man to be
arrested and, giving him back the Cupid, claimed and received the sum
paid for it.
The fact that Michelangelo, who went to Rome in the year 1496, wrote
in July, 1496, to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici that he had paid
a visit to the Cardinal di San Giorgio, shows that the prelate did not
bear the artist a grudge for the joke. In this letter Michelangelo
tells Lorenzo Medici that he has tried in vain to get the Cupid back
from Baldassarre Milanese, the dealer and go-between in the affair of
the Cardinal, but seeing that the man is obstinate in his refusal to
give back the statue he has been advised to use Cardinal San Giorgio’s
authority.
Condivi says that in some unknown way this statue passed into the hands
of Duke Valentino, and finally became the property of the Marchioness
of Mantua, who owned it at the time Condivi, the historian and
Michelangelo’s pupil, was writing.
After the small statuettes, Roman busts are a source of some excellent
imitations. Of these works, both in marble and bronze, many museums
possess good examples. The Uffizi Gallery has two or three good ones;
besides these the many restored busts and statues of this same Gallery
speak of the characteristic pliability and plagiarism in art of the
Renaissance. A fine bust in bronze of a hypothetical Roman emperor,
formerly in the collection of Baron Davillier, is now in the Louvre
Museum. It is evidently the work of an artist of the versatile and
prolific Paduan school.
This very school of Padua, strengthened by the advent of Vittore
Camelio, Cavino, de Bassiano, and other capable fakers of art--we
feel we need not scruple to use the word in association with these
names--is chiefly responsible for those coins, medals and small
bronzes that it would be naive to say were made solely for the sake of
imitating.
The imitations of bas-reliefs prepared perhaps the popularity of those
small bronze bas-reliefs called _plaquettes_ which seem to have meant
so much to the collector of the time. We even find the angelic Mino,
the last Renaissance artist who should have attempted to paganize
his sweetly ascetic art, trying his hand at these marble bas-reliefs
of Roman emperors, re-edited for the benefit of amateurs. These
bas-reliefs already seem to have inveigled artists into palming them
off with fantastic tales, giving them what might be called a shampoo
of history. In the Brunswick Museum there is a bas-relief in marble,
evidently aping antique art, representing an Aristotle in an absurd
pointed headgear and with the following inscription:--
ΑΡΙΣΤΟΤΕΛΗΣ
Ο ΑΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΤΟΝ (sic)
ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΩΝ
A replica of this bronze belonged to Charles Timbal’s collection, and
is now in the possession of Monsieur Gustave Dreyfus; a third, with an
identical inscription, is kept in the Modena Museum; a fourth is in the
Correr Museum of Venice; and, finally, a fifth sample of this fantastic
Aristotle is in the National Museum, the Bargello of Florence.
It is certain that there was a companion-piece to this Aristotle, the
portrait of Plato, which has come down to us in material other than
bronze, but which must have once been the pendant of the Aristotle, as
there are clay reproductions of both portraits, the Aristotle being
identical to the ones already quoted. Of Plato there are several
bas-reliefs in marble, one in the Bavarian Museum of Munich, another in
the Museum of Arezzo, and another in the Prado. In the latter museum
there is also an Aristotle in marble with its freakish head-covering,
long hair and a long beard; of Plato there are two marble bas-reliefs,
two medallions. In the larger one there is the inscription:--
ΠΛΑΤΩΝΟΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΥ
A curious fact to be noticed is that of these two portraits Aristotle’s
must have caught public fancy more than that of his philosophical
companion. Not only because of the numerous reproductions of the one
original but because it must have been popular already in the time of
Louis XII, being reproduced in clay in a medallion of the castle of
Alluye at Blois. In this race for popularity in a foreign country and
from a spurious origin, Plato seems to have lost nearly half a century,
as we find a reproduction in the castle of Ecouen about the middle of
the sixteenth century, which landed finally in the Museum of French
Monuments, where Baltard renamed it as the portrait of Jean Bullant. No
strange transition when one considers that a cast of the original Plato
was, for quite a long time, shown in the Louvre as the portrait of
Philibert Delorme.
The Louvre has a queer marble medallion, a work of the beginning of the
sixteenth century, of a Roman _Imperator Caldusius_, and a medallion of
Cato is now in the Museum of Beauvais.
When Vespasiano da Bisticci tells us that Niccoli “had in his house
an infinite number of medals in bronze and silver and gold, and many
antique brass figures, and many marble heads, and other valuable
things,” we can believe that they were genuine, but when it is a
question of a later collection of old marble heads, bas-reliefs and
medals, we wonder how many an Emperor Caldusius it contained.
This curious trade in and mania for _pastiche_ was assisted, it must
be added, by the tremendous skill that the artists of all periods of
the Renaissance seem to have possessed in moulding, recasting, and
composing one piece from two or three originals.
We know that Verrocchio used to make plaster casts of living people,
and the custom of making bust portraits and medallions from death
masks was quite common in the Quattrocento and later. Such post-mortem
reproductions were often ably disguised by the modelling stick, while
at other times they showed only too plainly their ghastly origin.
A regular riot of fakery, combined with the most fantastic
metamorphoses of Greek and Roman originals, existed for the benefit
of crazy numismatists, greedy collectors of medals and amateurs with
a fancy for small bronze bas-reliefs. In the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries the imitation of coins was most varied; some are quite
excellent reproductions of the antique ones, others again show the art
and style of the artist and his period but faintly disguised. Some of
these latter are at any rate charming works of art. The coins, medals
and small bronzes seem to emphasize the Renaissance mania for the
antique. Now, for instance, after giving the portrait of Adam, Eve,
Noah and Ham, Shem and Japhet, the _Promptuarium iconum insigniorum
a seculo hominum_, published in Lyons by Guillaume Reville (1553),
gives other engravings purporting to be authentic portraits of various
personages of antiquity. As a matter of fact many of these portraits
are copied from old medals that were circulating at the time, the work
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Mr. Courajod, the former
curator of the Louvre Museum, was able to prove this by finding some
of the medals from which the portraits of the _Promptuarium iconum_
had been copied. These portray Antigone, the lieutenant of Alexander
the Great, the king of Phrygia, Lysimachus, king of Thrace. The first,
an Italian bronze of the fifteenth century, is characteristic for the
effort made by the artist to counterfeit the Oriental style he may have
noticed, perhaps, in other coins of the time.
But, as we have said, where the fancy of the faker really ran riot
was in those small bronzes of various origin and still more various
purpose, nowadays called _plaquettes_. These bronzes were sometimes
cast from the form of an old cameo, at others they imitated or aped a
like origin, and whether they may have been used as buttons, pommels
of the hilts of swords, or simply been demanded by collectors, they
were for the most part imitations of the antique. In these works the
metamorphoses of the original are at times so numerous and so absurd as
to puzzle the modern collector and cause him to speculate on the acumen
of some of the connoisseurs of the past. With some of these small
bronzes the metamorphosis is not in the form but in the inscription
that sometimes accompanies the _plaquette_, but on other occasions the
subject and the figures are considerably altered. As an example of
the former we may quote the supposed portrait of Julius Cæsar of the
Courajod collection. In this case the _plaquette_ bears the inscription
“IVLLIVS C. . PP . PM.”, which has caused the wrong naming of this
bas-relief, for an identical _plaquette_, formerly in the collection of
Mr. Bardini of Florence, seems to indicate that it must be a question
of Cicero. The second inscription runs thus, “M. TVLLIVS .C.P.P.P.M.”
As for the second method, the alteration of the form and subject of
a _plaquette_, the fancy displayed by the makers borders upon the
grotesque.
To begin with a mild form of metamorphosis, let us follow the subject
of Apollo and Marsyas in its transformation from the original cameo
that was in the collection of Lorenzo il Magnifico and, according to
Muntz, is now in the Naples Museum, together with many others from the
same collection. In this cameo the god is on the right, playing the
lyre held in his left hand, Marsyas to the left has his hands tied
behind him, between the two figures kneels Olympus (a pupil of Marsyas)
interceding for his doomed master.
The supposed original in the Naples Museum bears but one inscription,
“LAVR MED.,” evidently standing for Lorenzo Medici, but Ghiberti tells
us that on this cornelian “around the said figures were _antique_
letters spelling the name of Nero.” There is nothing strange in this,
nor in the presupposition that the cameo had been Nero’s private seal,
as one knows he was fond of playing the lyre, but what casts some doubt
on the authenticity of the Naples cornelian stone is the fact that the
Berlin Museum possesses a bronze _plaquette_, evidently a reproduction
from some antique cameo, with the inscription to which Ghiberti
alludes, “NERO-AVGVSTVS-GERMANICVS-P-M-TR-P-IMP-PP-.” The cornelian
stone kept in the Naples Museum has no inscription and for this reason
is supposed by some to be a reproduction from the original ordered by
Lorenzo Medici. The _plaquette_ of the Berlin collection is thought to
be cast from the original Greek cornelian stone, though there are other
reproductions in various museums, one for instance in the Louvre very
similar to the one of Berlin, another in the collection of Courajod,
with the inscription, “PRUDENTIA. PURITAS. TERTIOM. QVOD. IGNORO.”
Mr. Courajod also owned two more copies of this subject, one similar
to the one of the Louvre with the addition of a border, the other of
larger dimensions with the figure resting on a ground in the form of
a crescent. A bas-relief of this subject, used as an ornament of the
pommel of a sword hilt and very similar to the other _plaquettes_ was
in the Davillier collection. N. Schlifer and Giovanni Boldu (1457)
treated the favourite subject with a certain plagiarism of the Greek
model. In Boldu’s bas-relief Apollo is in the usual attitude, but the
other figure has disappeared.
There are many other _plaquettes_, with small variations, in private
collections. There is also a _plaquette_ of this subject in the Dreyfus
collection, in which Apollo has become a woman and Marsyas is playing
the flute.
Evidently the subject must not only have been popular among collectors
but must have caught the fancy of artists as the composition of Apollo
and Marsyas is reproduced in a bas-relief of a fine door formerly in
Cremona and now in the Louvre Museum. The one at Naples is repeated
almost identically in a cornelian of the _Cabinet des Medailles_, in
a portrait of a young girl, attributed to Botticelli, in the Staedel
Museum of Frankfurt; on the frontispiece of a work executed for Mathias
Corvinus; on a frontispiece of the Sforziade, that rare work kept in
the library of the Riccardi in Florence; on a majolica dish of the
fifteenth century, now in the Correr Museum in Venice. There is a
plagiarism of this subject in a work by Raphael in the Vatican.
The following examples, however, are perhaps more typical of an
intentional transformation, a somewhat reversed case and an exception
to the rule in this sort of faking, namely a Christian subject turned
into a pagan one for the benefit of the fifteenth-century amateurs.
There still exist in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, two bas-reliefs
representing two incidents in the life of the saint who has given the
church its name, one when he is arrested and put to prison, the other
when he is chained in his cell and liberated by the angels. The two
bas-reliefs, wrongly attributed to Pollaiolo, were ordered from some
Roman artist in the year 1477 by Sixtus IV, then a simple cardinal.
Of each of these bas-reliefs there is a modified reproduction, one in
the Louvre and the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the
modifications of both are such as to make people believe them to be
pagan subjects and antique work. In the reproduction kept in the Louvre
the transformation of the subject without much alteration of the work
is so evident that we can see how easily old collectors were taken in
by these curious pieces of _truquage_. Of a more naive, but no less
efficient character is the transformation inflicted upon the bas-relief
of Kensington. Here in order to transform the miraculous liberation of
Saint Peter into the freeing of a Roman senator it has sufficed to clip
the angel’s wings, both inside the prison--the work being divided
into two different moments of the action--and where the saints usher
the apostle into the street.
[Illustration:
_Photo_: _Alinari_
MARSYAS
An excellent work by Pollajolo after the antique.]
There is no reason to disbelieve the supposition that this piece of
faking was perpetrated to cater for the mania of the art lover of
the time. As a matter of fact the Louvre bas-relief was considered
an antique till but recently, and that of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, which entered the collection wrongly labelled as the work
of Ghiberti, was believed, before 1863, when it was acquired by the
Museum, to be a work of the classic Græco-Roman period. As for over
three centuries they have passed as genuine work of the Roman Empire,
it is not reasonable to suppose that the amateurs of the time were
wiser than the succeeding generations of connoisseurs who believed the
work to be antique. This fact is eloquently brought out in the case of
the work preserved in the Louvre, as this bas-relief was not hidden but
has quite a long and well-established pedigree. Among other migrations
we can trace it to Malmaison in a sort of select collection of objects
coming from Italy. Edme Durand bought it as an antique and in the
belief that it was antique kept it in his collection. The Louvre Museum
also bought it for an antique and for quite a long time classified it
in the catalogue (N. 280) as an Etruscan bronze.
It would take too long to trace all the transformations of small
bronzes made for the benefit of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century
amateurs, the many reproductions with changes. Of the metamorphoses to
which _plaquettes_ were subject we can mention another curious example
in which a Crucifixion has become a Rape of the Sabines, and as a case
in which a popular subject has caused many reproductions, we quote
the Palladium of the Niccoli collection which has been reproduced by
Donatello, Nicolo Florentino, etc. The statue of Marcus Aurelius also
seems to have been a cherished subject for small statuettes from that
by Filarete given to Piero Medici in the year 1465 to reproductions of
the seventeenth century.
Of all the workmen of that fertile period running between the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, Moderno was the most active and versatile.
There is hardly a mythological subject that has not been treated by
him. His imitation of the antique is at times quite convincing, more
especially that belonging to the early period of his career. Later on
when he enters into what might be styled his matured sixteenth-century
temperament, he seems to suffer from the same trouble as the imitators
of the first third of the said century, namely, over-polish and
mannerism, which must in fact have been considered an improvement in
imitation. Valerio Belli, a sculptor and famous cutter of precious
stones and rock crystal, was quite justified in reproducing the subject
of his own carving in the small bronze bas-reliefs that now play such
an important part in modern collections of _plaquettes_, and which in
times gone by must have been the delight also of past collectors. They
often bore his signature, which speaks eloquently for the fact that
there was no intention to dupe anyone.
There were also other artists who evidently had a hand in faking
antiques. They belong more or less to various schools, but chiefly
to those of Padua and Venice. The Paduan school is in this respect
fortified by the names of Vittore Camelio, Cavino, Bassiano. Almost
every bronze founder is associated with an imitator of the antique,
either a maker of statuettes, inkstands, perfume vases, or _plaquettes_
of various sizes and use. Thus for a second time Italy became a
gorgeous market of imitation, very often in itself such good art as
to be worthier than the art counterfeited. One of the last of these
imitators was Tiziano Aspetti, to whom, rightly or wrongly, small
bronzes of private collections are attributed.
From the Anonimo Morelliano one gathers that there was a period in
which a gentleman could hardly afford to do without a little collection
of antiques. “The bronze figurines are modern by various masters and
are derived from the antique,” remarks this Anonimo of Morelli, as
though explaining that there were some collectors perfectly satisfied
with this and perhaps the silent accomplices of a fine piece of
faking. The Anonimo tells us that there were many such pieces in
the collections of either ignorant or accommodating collectors and
art lovers, in the house of Marco Bonavido of Padua, and that of a
rich merchant of the same city, the sculptor Alviso; in Venice, in
the collections of Odoni and Zuanno Ram. They are often mingled with
genuine antiques, which fact causes the Anonimo, who evidently thinks
himself either a connoisseur or a well-informed chronicler, to say
here and there, “the many bronze figurines are modern,” or “the many
medals are of modern bronze,” or “the medals are most of them antique.”
Precious confessions, as one can see.
We know but vaguely of imitations in painting, but an assembly of such
versatile artists can hardly have refrained from imitating the work
of some master. Besides, the very teacher at the head of a school did
not seem to resent it even if a pupil signed the name of his master.
But as regards imitating the antique, there were hardly any samples to
imitate. The grotesques of the old Roman ruins may have suggested to
more than one artist a new type of decoration; but this plagiarism,
if it can be called so, though not without influence on fifteenth and
sixteenth-century art, found no practical issue with fakers.
There is, however, an incident in which a piece of faking saved to
Florence a masterpiece of Raphael. It is related by Vasari in Andrea
del Sarto’s life. According to Vasari when Frederick II, Duke of
Mantua, came to Florence he greatly admired the portrait of Pope Leo
X, the magnificent painting now hanging in the Gallery of the Pitti
Palace in Florence. His admiration turned to such greedy desire of
possession that when he reached Rome he begged the then all-powerful
Clement VII to procure it for him. The Pope agreed to the Duke’s
request and ordered Ottaviano Medici, then residing in Florence,
to have the painting packed and sent to Mantua to Duke Frederick.
Ottaviano Medici, a lover of art and a Florentine, hating to deprive
his city of such a work, was yet not inclined to resist the wish of the
Pope and resorted to a ruse. He informed the Pope that the painting
should be sent to the Duke, according to His Holiness’ orders, as
soon as the frame had been repaired. The Duke of Mantua was also
informed that the frame needed regilding and that the painting should
be shipped as soon as the repairs were finished. With this excuse
Ottaviano Medici gained the necessary time and ordered from Andrea
del Sarto an exact copy of Raphael’s work, a copy that all experts
would mistake for the original. The work was done to such perfection
that even Ottaviano Medici, who was an art connoisseur, could not tell
the original from the copy: the pseudo-Raphael was sent off, the Duke
was duped and one of the finest portraits by Raphael was saved to
Florence. In Vasari there are comments here and there which lead us to
think that many others may have been duped by the versatility of the
fifteenth and sixteenth-century painters. We know that Bellini’s pupils
finished three-quarters of some of the great Venetian master’s works,
that Calchar imitated Titian so closely as to be taken for the great
Vecelli, but we do not know to what extent lovers of art of the time
may have been duped.
As for sculpture, we may close this study by quoting what Vasari writes
in the life of Vellano. “So great is the power of counterfeiting with
love and care any object, that, more often than not, if the style of
one of these arts of ours be well imitated by those who delight in the
work of whoever it be, the thing that imitates so closely resembles the
thing imitated, that no difference can be detected, except by the most
experienced eye.”
Of Ghiberti, a collector and versatile sculptor, Vasari tells that “he
took much pleasure in imitating the dies of ancient coins and medals.”
Which comment amply justifies the observation that the learned Milanesi
adds to the life of Valerio Belli, who at times, according to Vasari,
forgot to add his signature, and was extremely clever in counterfeiting
antiques, from which ability “he derived very great benefit.”
“Antique medals,” says Milanesi, “were very much in demand about this
time, consequently forgers and imitators abounded; they had in fact
multiplied to great numbers and fostered the art of counterfeiting to
its highest perfection.”