Medieval Fakery: Two “Masterpieces” by the Spanish Forger, c. 1900-20
“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.”
—Pablo Picasso, 1923
Much like beauty itself, the estimation of art, even fake art, has always lived in the eye of the beholder. This is so with each of these two works of fake medieval art. During the early 1930s, the remarkable director of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, Belle da Costa Greene, first exposed and also famously named the fake medieval painted panels, manuscripts—most of all, individual painted manuscript leaves of the co-called Spanish Forger beginning with a “Betrothal of St. Ursula”—as having been falsely attributed to the mid-fifteenth-century Spanish illuminator Maestro Jorge Inglès.
The long-time curator of medieval manuscripts at the Morgan Library, William Voelkle, grew fascinated by the work of the Spanish Forger and proceeded to build up a remarkable collection of his shadowy oeuvre, mounting an important exhibition in 1978. He has subsequently tracked the appearance of the Spanish Forger’s output in auctions, and in both private and institutional collections; the sum total of his oeuvre now stands at 427 (since February 2022, and counting) known examples, including 11 manuscript codices, 120 painted panels/triptychs, and 296 manuscript leaves. Specimens from the Spanish Forger’s prolific career continue to appear with some regularity in the antiquarian book market even today.
Voelkle’s research and forensic work has shed considerable light on the otherwise anonymous Spanish Forger. Since his entire corpus of works contains Paris or emerald green, they could not have been produced prior to 1814, when that copper arsenite pigment was first introduced to the world. Another compelling terminus post quem finding was that the Spanish Forger seems to have relied heavily on a series of illustrated Parisian imprints representing medieval and Renaissance scenes from largely authentic works of art, published by Paul Lacroix between 1869 and 1882, which had the added effect of popularizing medieval “primitives,” as they were sometimes regarded at the time.
Existing provenance evidence further suggests that most of the Spanish Forger’s output was sold in Paris, not Madrid. As he perhaps honed his skills as a chromolithographer, his production of fakes may have been inspired by necessity—the sometimes mother of invention—when less costly and work-intensive photographic reproduction started to displace chromolithographic printing. If so, his career would likely have begun around 1900, just as the Lacroix imprints will have begun their obsolescence. The turn to medieval art might also have formed something of a conservative reaction to the increasingly radical visual traditions of impressionism, cubism, and surrealism; indeed, the Spanish Forger seems to have been mostly active in traditionally Catholic France, and had imitators in Catholic Belgium and in England during its own early twentieth-century Catholic Revival.
The first of these fakes is an exquisite, large-scale “miniature” on parchment in red, green, blue, and yellow, with burnished gold applied to a reused leaf from a genuine late-medieval service book. The recto on which the illumination appears was scraped to remove its red-and black-textual and musical stave notations. The subject of the central panel is the legend of the Tiburtine Sibyl who purportedly revealed a celestial vision of the Virgin and Child to Emperor Augustus Caesar. According to the tale, the Roman Senate had decreed the apotheosis (deification) of Augustus; the emperor, in turn, consulted the sibyl to determine whether he should accept this honor. The sibyl’s response was to foretell the future coming of a child (i.e., Jesus Christ) who would be greater than all the gods in the Roman pantheon. This subject matter is doubly ideal for the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection, as it invokes another forgery in the collection, the so-called pagan oracular Sibylline Books, whose ultimate demolition as fakes did not occur until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The sibylline oracular texts were, in fact, late-antique Hellenistic Judeo-Christian forgeries intended to restore the reputations of Jews and Christians in the eyes of pagans, which included the retrojection into the pre-Christian past of even pagan predictions of the coming of Christ.
In this particularly handsome piece, even the borders bear distinctive elements of medieval romance: at the left, a courtly lady strums upon a harp while gazing upwards to the heavenly image of the Virgin and Child, while in the bottom center an armored knight battles a dragon with sword and buckler. Several hallmarks of the Spanish Forger’s distinctive style are well represented here, in particular his preference for filling his scenes with sweet-faced ladies in low-cut dresses that reveal considerable degrees of décolletage that is rather uncharacteristic of much authentic medieval illumination. Craquelure in the burnished gold and minor flaking to portions of the colored pigment also adds an antiqued texture to the overall visual performance.
While the large majority of the Spanish Forger’s surviving works are single-sheet miniatures, he also applied himself to paintings on wooden (often oak) boards. The Bibliotheca Fictiva includes one example of the latter: a medieval knight receiving his spurs before the prospect of a castle in the background. The marked androgyny of the armored knight has inspired some speculation as to whether the central figure might be Joan of Arc—another favorite subject of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forged illuminations, fueled in part by the absence of any contemporary images of her from her own lifetime. Regardless, further attributes of the Spanish Forger’s style are found here: namely, slightly elongated figures in courtly secular dress, theatrical hand gestures, saccharine faces, pointed footwear, and lollipop trees in the background alongside other almost tapestry-like foliage. Another version of this painting, also on wooden boards, was recently subjected to X-radiographic and ultraviolet imaging, revealing particular characteristics of the forger’s methods in that medium as well.
The Spanish Forger’s work inspired other illumination forgers, including the anonymous artists responsible for the Bibliotheca Fictiva’s fake manuscript miniature of Columbus arriving in the New World, as well as a suite of fake Burgundian manuscript illuminations on vellum, the latter also including “portrait” miniatures of Columbus and Joan of Arc.
Though the Spanish Forger’s work is truly an art of fakery, there were others who worked within the gray space between medieval and Renaissance manuscript restoration and facsimile reproduction. Although he began work as a restorer of damaged leaves for the collector and dealer John Boykett Jarman, nineteenth-century English illuminator Caleb Wing (d. 1875) soon extended his efforts to augmenting already existing decorations in genuine manuscript volumes, and even adding altogether new miniature pages to their illustrations. These were almost entirely drawn from authentic manuscript exemplars, and Wing proved himself to be skilled at selecting plausible subjects to place into the manuscript books he worked on, such as the volumes held by the Cambridge University Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens; assisted by William Voelkle
Bibliography
William Voelkle, Holy Hoaxes: A Beautiful Deception (Les Enluminures, 2019); William Voelkle, assisted by Roger S. Wieck, The Spanish Forger (Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978), esp. pp. 43 (L8), 67 (OM4.1), 68 (OL3, OL4), 70-72 (OL12, OL17-18, OL22); figs. 144-45, 269-71, 273, 292, 306, 314; “Supplemental Spanish Forger Catalogue” (accessible through the Morgan Library): “Tiburtine Sibyl,” L8, L164, L184, L230, L294 (JHU); “Knight Presented with Sword and Spurs,” L118, P113, P119 (JHU); William Voelkle, “The Spanish Forger: Master of Manuscript Chicanery,” in Thomas Coomans and Jan de Maeyer (eds.), The Revival of Medieval Illumination: Nineteenth-Century Belgium Manuscripts and Illuminations from a European Perspective (University of Leuven Press, 2007), 207–27; Sandra Hindman et al. (eds.), Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age (Northwestern University Press, 2001); Christina Currie, Steven Saverwyns and Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, “The Spanish Forger Exposed: An Interdisciplinary Study of Two of His Paintings,” in S. Panayotova and P. Ricciardi (eds.), Manuscripts in the Making: Art and Science (Brepols, 2018), 2:191–202; Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 40 (July 17, 2009): 2031–36; Mark Jones (ed.), Fake? The Art of Deception (University of California Press, 1990), 189–92; Janet Backhouse, “A Victorian Connoisseur and His Manuscripts: The Tale of Mr. Jarman and Mr. Wing,” The British Museum Quarterly 32 (1967–68): 76–92; Janet Backhouse, “The Spanish Forger,” The British Museum Quarterly 33 (1968): 65–67; Elaine Traherne, Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (Oxford University Press, 2021), 168–94; Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), 5, nos. 58–61.
