Giovanni Bastianini, Art Forgery, and the Market in Nineteenth‐Century Italy

Abstract

For art historians, journalists, and legal experts, the act of art forgery is a difficult concept to explain with historical precision. The act itself can be defined easily enough: forgery is the creation of a work of art with the intent to deceive.1 Yet the history of forgery is both protean and elusive. Although examples of forgery date back centuries, the significance of the act frequently depends on a specific context—for example, the increase in demand for a particular kind of art. Many experts agree that the presence of intent defines a forgery, but few agree on the motives to explain art forgery in any meaningful sense. Many experts agree that the presence of intent defines a forgery, they tend to focus on the specific motivations of individual forgers (revenge, frustration, egotism, greed), and these come to overshadow other possible explanations for deception. Any satisfactory historical explanation of forgery must reconcile this tension between locating the practice in a particular context and explaining the act according to the contingencies of individual motive. Varied efforts to explain the history of art forgery have highlighted key moments (ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century) in a sprawling narrative in which contingency frequently overshadows context.2