FORGERY IN ITALIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

There is no doubt about the importance of art in Italian society or the fact that this cultural value dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Most agree that Italian artists have been among the greatest contributors to Western civilisation. This combination of values has also generated a subculture and tradition of forgery. Some forgers are talented artists in their own right and it is not unusual for Italians to figure among the best. Discussions of the history of forgery in Italy often begin with ancient Roman emulation of Greek sculpture (Fleming 1975, 6). The Romans considered Greek sculpture to be superior, so Roman sculptors worked to copy the style and figures of the Greeks. These activities might not have been considered forgery at the time but appear to be considered by scholars of forgery as one of the first examples of, at the very least, ‘imitation’ in the Western world. Phaedrus, the fabulist, wrote poetry that included accounts of forgery of silver coinage across the Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus, and there exists archaeological evidence of counterfeiting in Britain under the Romans (Fleming 1975, 6). According to Fleming (1975, 14), the year 1524 marks the first literary documentation of a forgery among paintings. An author named Pietro Summonte described the activities of a Neapolitan artist named Niccolò Antonio Colantonio who, 70 years earlier, was said to have copied a portrait of the Duke of Burgundy so successfully that when the copy was returned in place of the original, the owner did not notice.

It was not until 1735 that a European country, England, issued the very first example of copyright laws – then limited to engraved art (Engraving Copyright Act ). Up until that point, counterfeiters had not faced any criminal convictions and the worst that could happen to them was to fall from grace and lose the ‘protection’ of their patrons (Andros 2014).

Following the adoption of these and subsequent laws over the next 200 years, the counterfeiter has come to be seen no longer as an artist with valid talent and skills, but rather as a criminal. In Italy the falsification of artworks was not addressed by specific laws until 1939 and counterfeiters were still condemned under the ‘Counterfeiting of Private Writing’ article of the criminal code.