This special issue of the Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History is dedicated to research on fakes and forgeries in the early modern period.Footnote1 However, this topic does not only apply to what is considered true or fake, real or unreal, original or copy, but goes hand in hand with a more complex discussion on perception, history and visual identity. The definition of fake is according to The Concise Dictionary of Art Terms, “a work of art or artefact that is not genuine and is intended to deceive”.Footnote2 However, as the words ‘fakes and forgeries’ are often associated with crime, deceit, theft and so forth, it may come as a surprise how widely these terms are applied in the selected articles for this special issue.
But why pay attention to artefacts that are not authentic and that may even have been produced for the sole purpose of deceiving an art market based on art historic expertise dealing with hugely profitable bona fide works?
In 1990, the art historian Mark Jones curated the acclaimed exhibition “FAKE?” at the British Museum. Jones edited and wrote the introduction to the groundbreaking anthology of research that was presented at the associated symposium in June 1990, and put into words at that time why fakes do matter.Footnote3 The key work published within the field Why fakes matter: essays on problems of authenticity published in 1992, discussed in a convincing way why fakes and forgeries should be of significance to art historians amongst others. The exhibition and subsequent publication created a new field of research where fakes were considered as objects that were legitimate to be studied in their own right and important for science and research.
As art historians of our time, we are well aware that changes in appreciation occur, and that perspectives on originality and authenticity can change over the course of time: today’s fakes can be tomorrow’s authentic pieces. A simple example for these kinds of shifts are artefacts like coins or medals that originally were commodities for their owners which, even in a faked form, eventually would increase in value by mere aging, while they lose or at least change their original function.Footnote4
A more complex phenomenon that was adduced by Jones are the changes in attitude toward qualities such as authenticity and originality: while the portrait market of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was based on the main quality of a portrait being close to its subject, this quality lost relevance during the nineteenth century, when the portrait market’s prime demand implied original pieces expressing a custom made creation that could be ascribed to an individual artist.Footnote5 With our current understanding of changes like these, we can again appreciate the value of copied portraits from the early modern period and the good deal of knowledge we can gain through them, even though their value doesn't measure in qualities such as being an authentic or original work.
Consequently, an art historian of our time would surely not neglect a work of art that lacks authenticity, or that even is a fake, as it can be significant for research and knowledge. Art historians like Aby Warburg have given us enough examples which demonstrate that visual materials have no limits in where they can migrate in time and space, and we know that even a copied artefact of the poorest quality can make a pertinent statement, for instance, a reproduction of an original lost piece can be invaluable for research.
Talking about shifts of value and meaning over time we also need to mention the different understandings of temporalities and how they are manifest in artefacts of the early modern period. Over recent years, the art historians Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel have under the phrase “renaissance anachronism” examined and discussed the understandings of temporalities in the pre-modern period and identified a different notion of historicity, which led them to introduce their substitutional model.Footnote6 As images, artefacts and buildings generally were perceived as “tokens of types” that could easily be substituted by newer replicas. The temporality of such objects was grasped in the form of chains of “effective surrogates” that, by repetition, made artefacts simultaneously belong to more than one historical moment.Footnote7
So, even objects that were made recently could be valued in the same way as an ancient piece, which is not self-deluding, but expresses a different understanding of repeated historicity in artefacts.Footnote8 Even if pre-modern experts and people of that time had no knowledge about the point of origin of an artefact, they would understand it as a link in this imperceptible and unreconstructable chain of replicas that at the same time established an authoritative source and founded the copied artefact’s own identity. Thus, pre-modern production of artefacts expresses a performative understanding of historicity. The imitation and repetition of earlier objects in an artefact were seen as their extraction from history and their reactivation in the present: “the past participated in the present”.Footnote9 This different position on historicity that is manifest in the substitutional model of the pre-modern period determines of course also this era’s diverging disposition towards mimicking concepts as copies and counterfeits.
One of the most important aspects of fakes and forgeries for an art historian is implied in the material aspects of the faked artefact itself. As Mark Jones pointed out: “Each society, each generation, fakes the thing it covets the most”.Footnote10 This gives us a solid reason to study faked artefacts and forgeries as they reveal an insight into the culture of earlier historical periods and their art markets. As the motive behind many forgeries in the art world is the forger's cupidity, the faked objects disclose information about the art market and the taste of the time that is very precious to the art historian.Footnote11 A forger wishing to maximize his profit was most certainly concerned with imitating the most desirable objects in the most attractive style of the period, which is why the faked item itself is a valuable piece of information for the researcher.
It is surely not an overstatement that art historians generally maintain a keen interest in questions of reception and perception: how would an audience of that time perceive this artefact? What would a collector of that period see and appreciate when laying their eyes on that work of art? Copies of objects or replicas sometimes take us closest to a real sense of a historical period, or as Mark Jones puts it: “The fakes that look neo-classical to us, looked ancient to them; we see in them what they saw in the genuine article”.Footnote12
So, the study of fakes and forgeries is not only a matter of providing expertise to the art market and collectors of our time, but likewise driven by a critical historiographical concern to establish correct ideas of art historical periods. Even a forgery can provide knowledge and add to our capacity of reconstructing an art historical epoch and its conditions. The aforementioned real sense that fake items can make obvious to us, can be seen as an activation of the period eye after Michael Baxandall.Footnote13 The faked object made for a specific historical art market can be a tool for the researcher to reconstruct the social circumstances of production as well as the visual equipment of a place and time that differs from our own. As the art market in the early modern period has been a primal condition for artistic production, which has governed how art was created, perceived and valued, profound knowledge about it cannot be underestimated. Forgeries reflect these art markets and their conditions in a substantial way.
An art historian studying artefacts from the early modern period has many times less archival and source materials to avail herself of than a researcher of later periods. Therefore, every object that can contribute as a piece of information on the art of the period is an asset for the researcher. This modus operandi needs of course also to embrace faked objects. As forgeries in general aim to imitate the most sought-after artefacts of a period, they can be seen as a manifestation of the foremost taste, style and subjects of bygone times and should thus appeal to the many proponents of studies of art history in our time.
After the material turn, in art history, as well as in other disciplines within the humanities, the focus on the study of material culture and empiricism has increased. Art historians examine to a higher degree artefacts as the physical matter they are and represent, in order to obtain knowledge about the culture or society they were created in. This kind of evidence-based research is reflected in new fields of art history such as Technical Art History with its studies of materials, artistic techniques and production methods that are constituent components of the works of art. The technical examination of the object reveals the creative process with all its artistic choices in which the artists’ reflections are manifested. The object itself tells us about its origin and its circumstances. Of course, this method does also apply to fakes and forgeries.
So, 30 years after the groundbreaking exhibition and publications by the British Museum, fakes and forgeries are of course still interesting and engaging art historians all around the world, and have nowadays even started to fascinate a broader audience. The general interest in fakes and forgeries may be more widespread than ever, as the attention given to the topic in the media corroborates. In the last few years, a wide range of documentaries on art crime has been produced for television and streaming companies. Even in the movie theatre, a fascinated audience followed the sensational case of the “Salvator mundi” that was dubbed a Leonardo da Vinci.Footnote14
These sensations in the art world that make their way into the evening news are based on the presuppositions of the art market in our own time. The production of forgeries is promoted by an ever exploding art market that is willing to pay unprecedented amounts of money for rare works of art. This is an art market that is constantly hyped by the perpetual hunt to find the next big thing, may it be a forgotten masterpiece or a lost object. The astronomical amounts of money next to the unbelievable stories will of course grant more space in the news and in public entertainment. The current development of new scientific techniques, as used in Technical Art History, that allow us to examine works of art on a nanoscale level, can for example put earlier undetected forgeries to the test and thus contribute even more to the general enthusiasm about fakes and forgeries in the art world.
This special issue of the Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History is another piece of evidence that fakes and forgeries do not cease to interest researchers within the academic discipline of art history. The volume on hand is a result of an international conference, “Faking it – Forgery and fabrication in early modern and late medieval culture”, organized by the interdisciplinary Early modern seminar at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Gothenburg in August of 2019. The scope of the conference was to explore the many and varying ways in which legitimate forms of production spawned illegitimate ones in late medieval and early modern culture, what is real and what is fake and how in the late medieval and early modern European culture these fakes and forgeries were widely discussed and realized in new and unprecedented ways.
This leads us to finally say a few words about the title of this special issue of the Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, “Fakes and forgeries in the early modern period”. The alluring alliteration that we chose for the title is undeniably containing two words that may express negative association toward the discussed phenomenons: fakes and forgeries. This is not our intention. As the reader may have noticed by now, we are fascinated by the sophisticated processes of making copies, replicas, fakes, counterfeits and forgeries, and acknowledge both the artefacts and their status in the early modern period, as well as the knowledge that can be drawn from our study of them.
As we started work on this special issue, we realized that we needed to broaden the topic, allowing contributors to deal with copies, counterfeits and replicas in a broader sense, not only those produced to deceive a buyer, a museum or an audience. As we have pointed out earlier, there is a distinct shift concerning the concepts and their meanings, which of course also will be made a subject of discussion in the articles. What we nowadays can deem a fake may very well have been a legitimate copy in its own right without any criminal intentions at all. The twenty-first century’s understanding of artistic copyright and original works, as well as the implications of copies and replicas was only established in the modern time. Every word we could use, be it copies, replicas, fakes or forgeries, would in some way be unjustified. The different concepts and transferred meanings, as well as the variety of underlying reasons and premises for the production of copies, fakes and forgeries and their status in the early modern period will be discussed more thoroughly in the articles on hand.
Despite the small scale of this special issue, the scope of the articles ranges from different times throughout the early modern period, and deal with varying media, materials and concepts from different geographical areas in Europe.
In the first article, Barbara Furlotti takes us to sixteenth-century Italy and the fashionable all’antica works, crafted counterfeits of ancient artefacts such as engraved gems and coins, sculptures and inscriptions. As sixteenth-century artists became skilled experts on artefacts from antiquity, it is now particularly difficult to distinguish forgeries from that time. An aggravating circumstance that Furlotti picks up on is the unreliable source material that not only can be contradictory towards material evidence, but it could be just as forged as the artefacts: forgers could fabricate written evidence to authenticate their faked artefacts. Furlotti elevates the examples of two Italian sixteenth-century experts, Enea Vico and Pirro Ligorio, who wrote conspicuously, or even suspiciously, versed treatises about forger’s techniques that provide us with key insights on the multisensory approach that helped sixteenth-century experts to identify forgeries. In that way the treatises not only lend us the period eye, but also its ear and finger tips. Last but not least we get an insight into the period’s own disposition towards forgeries: the fraud itself was not the worst felony, the distortion of historical truth manifested in the faked objects was.
Furlotti’s article underlines the significance of thorough research on the production history in the sense of Nagel and Wood.Footnote15 In order to prove whether deception was intended or not, meaning whether an object was deemed a contemporary imitation or a fraud, we have to understand the context in which the counterfeits were produced and how they were marketed.
In the second article, Charlotta Krispinsson takes us to Sweden and Northern Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to discuss image circulation and the copying of paintings as an artistic practice. The selected examples illuminate both the intention of copying, as well as its contemporary status. While she discusses that there’s no dichotomy between original and copy in that time and geographical area, her major point is that the three discussed portrait paintings of Margareta Eriksdotter (Vasa) from 1528 rather can be seen as three original paintings than copies. Krispinsson’s example from the seventeenth century – the copy of “The Sun Dog Painting” from 1636 – gives evidence of another common practice, namely early modern renewals of images where the original painting could just be disposed of when replaced by a fresh copy.
In the third article Simen Kallevik Nielsen deals with a metaphysical kind of forgery in England shortly after the Reformation. He discusses the semantics of “making” in the realm of religious discourses within the Calvinist Church and picks up on both linguistic aspects of the English language, as well as their relation to contemporary image production. Kallevik Nielsen discusses the usage of the ambiguous meaning of “making” in the language and how the word is embodied in ideas such as real and fake. The article further deals with the creation of the new Christian visual identity, what could be considered true religious imagery, and how the early modern English person questioned a pious person’s ability to make the distinction between true and false. In that way images were part of the same metaphysical economy as relics and miracles, and their “madeness” by human hand led to them being considered compromised and a treason against God himself. So, this article deals with a different but significant kind of forgery within a religious and theoretical realm of image production in the early modern period.
Today, as in the early modern period, the meaning and status of fakes and forgeries have fluctuated and are still constantly revised. For art historians, fakes matter a great deal as we can use information to produce conclusive research by the help of a copy or a replica. We have to reevaluate the negative connotations surrounding fakes, not only but also because many of them were not produced in malice or to deceive. However, what we hope to convey with this special issue is that there’s plenty of knowledge to gain from the study of fakes and forgeries, not only from the objects and their physical matter, but also from their production history and the historical discourses around them. There’s more to the study of early modern fakes and forgeries than meets the eye of modern sensationalists.
Notes
1 We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the writer and poet Carol McKay from South Lanarkshire, who gladly and promptly agreed to proofread these editorial notes.
2 Clarke, Michael, The Concise Dictionary of Art Terms (2nd ed.) [electronic resource], Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, accessed 27-01-2022, https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/view/10.1093/acref/9780199569922.001.0001/acref-9780199569922-e-696.
3 Jones, Mark, “Introduction: Do fakes matter?”, in: Mark Jones (ed.), Why Fakes Matter: Essays on Problems of Authenticity, British Museum Press, London, 1992, p. 7
4 Jones 1992, p. 8.
5 Jones 1992, p. 8.
6 Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 3, 2005, p. 405.
7 Nagel and Wood, 2005, pp. 405 and 407.
8 Nagel and Wood, 2005, p. 405.
9 Nagel and Wood, 2005, pp. 407–408.
10 Jones, Mark, “Why Fakes?”, in: Mark Jones with Paul Craddock and Nicholas Baker (eds), FAKE?: The Art of Deception, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990, p. 13.
11 Jones 1992, p. 9.
12 Jones 1992, p. 9.
13 Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988.
14 The Danish director Andreas Koefoed’s documentary film “The Lost Leonardo” from 2021 was shown in movie theaters, while another documentary on the same topic aired on TV the same year, the French director Antoine Vitkine’s Savior for Sale: Da Vinci’s Lost Masterpiece? (French title: “Salvator Mundi: la stupéfiante affaire du dernier Vinci”).
15 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, Zone Books, New York, 2010, pp. 281–282.