Between January and June 2024 Barbara Furlotti will be conducting research in Berlin, Rome and London as a Census x Hertziana x Warburg fellow. The fellowship was first inaugurated as a partnership between the Census and the Hertziana in 2022, and expanded in 2023 to include the Warburg Institute as well.
Dr Barbara Furlotti is Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld. She has received international fellowships in Europe and the US, including the Getty Residential Fellowship (2009–2010) and the Marie Curie Fellowship (2012–2015), and has contributed to numerous research projects. She has published extensively on the history of collecting, especially in relation to Mantua and Rome, the art market in the early modern period, and antiquarianism. Her most recent book, Antiquities in Motion: From Excavation Sites to Renaissance Collections (Getty Publications, 2019) investigates the mechanisms of the market for antiquities in sixteenth-century Italy. Recently, she has co–curated the exhibitions ‘Giulio Romano: Art and Desire’ (Mantua, 2019–2020) and ‘Giulio Romano: the Power of Things’ (Mantua, 2022–2023).
Census x Hertziana x Warburg Project: True Lies: Restorations, Reproductions, and Fake Antiquities
In his Discorsi sopra le medaglie degli antichi (1555), Enea Vico addresses the problem of false antique coins by identifying three categories of forgeries: the ‘fully ancient’ deceits, obtained by either heavily reworking ancient coins or pasting two of them together; the ‘partially ancient’ frauds, made with old metal struck with modern dies; and the ‘completely modern’ coins, cast with new metal. Compared to Vico’s subtle classification, the definition of forgery provided by the Oxford English Dictionary – ‘The making of a thing in fraudulent imitation of something’ – sounds simplistic and tainted by moral judgement. Contemporary binary descriptors, such as prototype/replica and original/fake, also exemplify our difficulties in grasping Renaissance’s more nuanced approach to forgeries and manipulated antique pieces.
My project stems from this conceptual chams. It aims to answer questions regarding the impact that Renaissance restoration practices had on the reception of antiquities, and the role played by forgers and antiquarians in disseminating alternative versions of the past. As such, it will hopefully help rethinking how to present fake antiquities in the Census database. My research also investigates the material and practical aspects of early modern restorations and forgeries by reconstructing how they were carried out, with what materials and tools, by whom, and why.
In general, art historians have been reluctant to engage with the issue of fake antiquities, and for good reasons: only a handful of early modern forgeries are well-documented, while most of the works that we now suspect were created as reproductions or fakes lack enough documentation; similarly, it is hard to substantiate the many complaints about antiquarian forgeries and forgers found in primary sources with surviving material evidence. Moreover, fake antiquities could be created from scratch, as explained by Vico, or assembled using original and newly sculpted parts, a practice that, to our eyes, blurs the line between restoration and forgery. To further complicate the situation, artists and antiquarians were often complicit in creating forgeries to meet the increasing demand for ancient finds from all over Europe, but also in response to intellectual discussions and to support ideas otherwise impossible to verify. By taking all these aspects into account, my project looks at reproductions, alterations and forgeries of antiquities not as deplorable second-class works created ‘in order to deceive people’, but as crucial evidence of the material, technical and antiquarian knowledge that artists and antiquarians shared in the early modern period.
