A Genuine Renaissance Fake: An Apollo and Pegasus Forged Binding
Pecuniary forgery—that is, the forgery of books and manuscripts primarily for sale to collectors particularly during the era of nineteenth-century “bibliomania”—has taken many forms. Fake “autograph” letters or title pages inscribed by famous authors are among the most common, a form of which there are numerous exemplars in the Bibliotheca Fictiva encompassing the supposed authorship, or at least past ownership, of Martin Luther, August de Thou, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, to name but a few. Books bearing bookplates and distinctive bindings denoting their presence in distinguished libraries form another subset, particularly those from the great Renaissance libraries of Petrarch and the eminent sixteenth-century French book collector Jean Grolier.
Indeed, in the Sheridan Libraries’ Laurence Hall Fowler Collection of Architectural Books there has long lived a handsome French edition of Vitruvius, Architecture, ou, Art de bien bastir (Paris, 1547), handsomely bound in highly decorative boards characteristic of Grolier right down to his famous motto, “Io. Grolierii et Amicorum.” Unfortunately, the binding is an elaborate nineteenth-century forgery attributed to Théodore Hagué (1822–1891) of Brussels.
The present volume represents a similar enterprise undertaken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to capitalize on the fame of a similar, luxuriously bound collection assembled by the Genoese banking magnate Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (ca. 1524–1612). Content to build for himself a 144-volume “una libbraria finita” for a cultivated man and patron of the arts of Apollo, Grimaldi focused on both ancient and modern authors. He had texts by classical Greco-Roman authors bound in dark black, brown, or green goatskin bindings, while all his modern writers were bound in red. At the center of each of these was a distinctive central oval plaquette depicting Grimaldi’s device of Apollo driving the chariot of the Sun and Pegasus standing atop Parnassus, his mountain home, in the distance—whence the conventional title of the so-called Apollo and Pegasus Binder. The mythographic vignette is surrounded by an equally characteristic Greek motto ΟΡΟΩΣ ΚΑΙ ΜΗΑΟΞΙΩΣ (Straight, and not crooked) in gilt inside a collar.
No rare-book collection of prized Renaissance bindings is quite complete without one of these handsome books, and to this day they fetch astronomical prices. Even a humble octavo of the works of Seneca sold for $106,000 at a Christie’s auction in 2004! Considering the highly limited nature of Grimaldi’s collection of 144 books, several unscrupulous binders took the opportunity to capitalize on this impossibly rare desideratum of the private collector, designing around 45–50 known fakes. Even the forged versions can fetch thousands of dollars depending on the nature of the book and the quality of the fake. The binder forger’s task was, in each instance, fairly straightforward: find a nice early-to-mid-sixteenth-century imprint of a classical author in its original binding—dark for ancients, red for moderns—and simply add decorative gilt flourishes and overlay a facsimile at the center of the traditional Apollo and Pegasus plaquette.
The Bibliotheca Fictiva holds one such example, containing a fine 1537 Italian imprint of Homer’s Odyssey with scattered early manuscript annotations. Its binding was almost certainly executed by perhaps the most skilled of the three Apollo and Pegasus binder forgers, Vittorio Villa (d. 1892) of Bologna and Milan, whose work may have been consciously imitative of known examples produced in the sixteenth century by Marcantonio Guillery, one of Grimaldi’s known binders. A manuscript ex libris note on the verso of the first blank inside the book, “proprietà di Carlo Balzi, 1884,” certainly suggests that Villa may have completed this volume sometime in the 1870s or early 1880s.
This unique binding first appeared in sixteenth-century Genoa, when Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, a student at the Roman Accademia della Virtù, had his library of approximately two hundred volumes bound in goatskin with a very particular design featuring an oval plaquette showing Apollo and Pegasus at the middle of each cover and the Greek motto “Straight and not crooked” in gilt in a collar around the vignette. The bindings, produced by three eminent masters, have enjoyed long-standing fame for their beauty and uniqueness, and inspired at least two forgers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Vittorio Villa of Bologna and Milan, who almost certainly produced this binding. The dead giveaway, as Hobson first observed in 1975, of Villa’s fakes is that Apollo’s chariot wheel possesses only four spokes rather than the original six seen in authentic examples.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Anthony Hobson, Apollo and Pegasus. An Enquiry into the Formation and Dispersal of a Renaissance Library (G. Th. van Heusden, 1975); H. M. Nixon, “Binding Forgeries,” Actes du VIe Congrès international des bibliophiles, 1969 (Association de bibliophilie, 1971), 73–76; Michel Wittock, À propos des reliures, vraies ou frelatées, au médaillon d’Apollon et Pégase. Une enquête à travers les sources bibliographiques, Bulletin du Bibliophile 1 (1998): 330–66; Michel Wittock, “Il medaglione di Apollo e Pegaso,” in L’oggetto libro 2000 (Bonnard, 2001), 88–113; Mark Jones, Nicholas Barker et al. (eds.), Fake? The Art of Deception (British Museum, 1990), 192–93; Mirjam Foot, “Double Agent: M. Caulin and M. Hagué,” The Book Collector, Special Edition for the 150th Anniversary of Bernard Quaritch (1997), 136–50; Elizabeth DeBold, “Under Cover: Forged Bindings on Display at the Folger,” The Collation on-line blog, Folger Shakespeare Library, July 19, 2018.
