Art and Authenticity

I

No amateur should be ashamed of occasionally buying a forgery, and a museum official similarly deceived should regard the mishap as an ordinary hazard of his profession, unless he has neglected obvious precautions and spent too much of other people’s money. Indeed, the collector who is too cool and patient ever to be taken in by a forgery simply lacks the enthusiasm and audacity proper to his pursuit. No great collection was ever made save by a collector who was willing to live dangerously. Naturally no account is taken here of collections which are not collections — namely, those which are made by dealers. The great dealer occasionally buys forgeries, but never wittingly passes them on to a client. They reappear eventually in the auction room or in the hands of small dealers who guarantee nothing but first appearances. Forgeries apparently are never destroyed, hence their number constantly increases. But, since fashion and taste change, only a limited class of forgeries is dangerous at any given time.

The dealers and agents who landed the sculptures of the contemporary Roman artist Alceo Dossena in the museums of Berlin, Cleveland, Boston, and New York chose their moment shrewdly. They counted on an inordinate competition for the virtually unattainable*—first-class sculpture of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. To an anomalous demand they responded with a truly extraordinary supply. That some of these dealers and intermediaries were themselves deceived in no way alters the situation. Had Signor Dossena’s graven images looked like three or four figures on the sales account, nobody would have been fooled. But they looked like five or six figures, and pretty much everybody was fooled. What there is about a forger and a forgery that obscures usually sound judgments is my theme. It will lead us into odd byways of human thinking and feeling.

Before coming to grips with the alluring details of the subject, before feeling the bumps of the forger himself and those of his victims, just a word on general and historical principles. Whenever there is scarcity of any sort of object in the art market, and corresponding dearness, there will be forgeries. For example, up to ten years ago there were few collectors of Italian painting of the century before Giotto. What little strayed to the antiquaries was called Byzantine, and could be had at your own price. Twenty years ago I bought a good little panel of this period—it is now in a well-known museum as my gift — for five dollars. For ten years past forgeries of this art have flooded the market — the period having meanwhile become fashionable through study and attribution. Last winter in a single auction sale in New York I saw a dozen such forgeries. The seller believed in them, and the buyers did not wholly disbelieve, for they paid prices which, while low for the appearance, were high for the reality. Forgery, then, follows collecting fashion with the same economic inevitableness that trade follows the flag.

Good forgeries at their first appearance always deceive a large number of experts, but are quickly detected. Here may be comfort for vendors and buyers of Dossenas. In a kindly spirit Dr. John Rubens, father of the great painter, having seduced the feebleminded wife of William the Silent, wrote from prison to the offended prince a consolatory letter in which he passed in review all the great personages whose wives had betrayed them. Dr. John was really establishing a new order of nobility, and as well qualifying his monarch. So I may cite the Louvre, which some seventy years ago bought a terra-cotta portrait bust by the contemporary Florentine sculptor Bastianini, and stoutly maintained its authenticity against all comers until Bastianini, entirely innocent of the deception, claimed his own work. A little later two pretty profiles of girls by the Italian picture restorer Tricca were bought respectively by Carrand, a true leviathan among collectors, and by Morelli, greatest connoisseur of his times. The second, which was by way of being a Leonardo da Vinci, transiently won the acceptance of Mr. Berenson, whose expertise in Italian painting is unique for breadth and accuracy. About thirty years ago a challenge of the splendid gold tiara of Saitaphernes in the Louvre set the archaeological world agog. Its defenders did not yield until the maker, Roukhomoski, came from the Crimea, and repeated in Paris a portion of his masterpiece. About the same time, Professor Ioni was multiplying his clever imitations of old Sienese painters. They were not made to deceive, but I hardly know any private collector of primitives who has not at one time or another bought an Ioni as genuine. No false modesty is going to keep me out of this list. I who write have bought for myself a false Gentile Bellini, a forged Manet, and, for the museum which I have the honor to direct, a more than doubtful Sassetta. If we have erred, we have erred in good company.

II

Back now to our real theme — the forger, his work, and his victim.

I have known only three forgers. One was the late Arthur Dawson, who painted the Homer D. Martins which were the occasion of a famous if inconclusive trial; another cut classical intaglios at Rome; a third still fabricates Albert P. Ryders and occasionally a Whistler. Upon so narrow a basis I am unwilling to generalize, but it is at least notable that all three were relatively unmercenary, the incentive to production being a professional pride in their gift of mimicry. I doubt if Dawson began by intending to pass off his pictures as Martins. It is certain that he never profited greatly through the deception his canvases brought about. He naturally imitated techniques that he admired; had done so always. It is entirely possible that the discovery that his pictures could be successfully offered as Martins was not made by Dawson himself, but by some dealer, and it is also possible, if unlikely, that the dealer or dealers did not know the difference between a plausible echo by Dawson and a masterpiece by Martin. What is certain is that the Dawsons became more Martinlike; and the inference is plain that, if the forger begins innocent, he is rarely allowed to remain so.

The artist who made the classical intaglios and he who makes the Ryders charged scrupulously right prices, never offering even their best imitations at anything near the valuation of the respective originals. The man who makes the Ryders likes to see pompous or merely hopeful amateurs rising to his lure, likes to hear what they say; and his Ryders, inside of one hundred dollars, when the market calls for many thousands, are excellent value, and no buyer has any right to complain. Of course this is the basse-cour of forgery, but I believe the psychology is the same all the way up. The forgery is the expression of a naïve vanity of imitation. It would exist even if it were unsalable. It is made in the same spirit as those triolets and villanelles à la Austin Dobson which grace the first manner in poetry of many of my literary contemporaries. At this stage there is no forgery, but rather a concrete compliment to some better master. The same object becomes a forgery when it turns out that it can be sold as of its apparent artist and period. Unlike other artists, the forger is not self-made. It is the dealer who makes him, as it is the hasty and extravagant amateur who in turn makes the fraudulent dealer.

The case may be studied in the person of Professor Ioni, now director of the Siena Gallery, who has never been a forger in any sense, but whose pictures have been sold fraudulently by unscrupulous dealers. Professor Ioni began about thirty years ago as a producing archaeologist. He studied the technique of the Sienese primitives, made up his panels by combining features from various pictures of the moment chosen, successfully avoided anachronisms, and achieved handsome decorative effects. These pictures passed into commerce for precisely what they were — uncommonly artistic imitations of Sienese primitives; and then the confusion arose. Amateurs believed in them. Dealers encouraged such belief. The Ionis entered scores of modest collections and a few famous ones. There was a moment when I could stroll up and down the Via dei Fossi, in Florence, and have the Ionis offered to me alternately as modern and as fine originals, according to the dealer’s estimate of his own character and of my intelligence. Now it is past. An Ioni to the trained eye is as recognizable as any Sienese old master. And here is a parable. No such imitation holds its own for long. It is soon detected. The assault of the forger on the amateur is always in the nature of a surprise at tack.

III

Before we leave the subject of that forgery which is more or less innocent and incidental a word is due on the wholesale manufacture of objects of art in the historic styles. Anywhere in Europe and frequently in America you will see shop windows groaning with carved ivories, sculptured metal and marble, paintings and enamels. The contents of any such window would represent millions, if only half the objects were real. Of course all are factory-made, — mostly at Heidelberg, report has it, — and there is no pretense that they are old. But, oddly enough, there is a type of collector who will buy from such stocks in the hope — nay, in the conviction — that he is landing a masterpiece under the nose of an ignorant dealer. It is hard for the most honest dealer to refrain from fostering such presumption. Or suppose the dealer is less than honest — puts the ivories and bronzes in a compost heap and lets chemistry work, exposes the enamels and marbles moderately to the sand blast, bakes the pictures in the oven to produce crackle, and anoints them with licorice juice to give a plausible patination of time. Suppose he then introduces a few of these pieces into a stock generally genuine. The good company, which would cruelly expose them to a good eye, will sell them to a poor but hopeful eye if the prices are alluring.

This kind of dealer wisely makes no pretensions for such wares. Indeed he tells an intelligent amateur what they are before the question is raised. The reckoning is with the vanity and optimism of the untrained bargain hunter, and it is rarely disappointed. A great New York merchant who had been notably successful in picture collecting unhappily undertook the desperate task of finding genuine ivories amid this shop product. He assembled over two hundred pieces. Through some wavering of taste or through simple working of the doctrine of probabilities, half a dozen pieces were genuine, and of no consequence, He even published an illustrated catalogue which cost ten times the value of the collection and courteously presented me with a copy. I spent much effort in avoiding a survey of the ivories, for I knew it would be not merely disagreeable but also entirely fruitless to tell him the truth, and he was withal a dignified and amiable gentleman. Of such is the salt of the earth for the dealer who occasionally varies his stock with a forgery.

There are still lower depths. The easiest way to make an old master is to varnish any process color print and offer it in an aged frame. A friend once returned aglow from the Rag Market at Rome, bearing a tiny painting by Pinturicchio in an apparently old frame. The composition was familiar to me, the dimensions suggestive. Begging permission, I removed the panel front the frame, and there appeared a varnished post card. Nothing was amiss with the transaction except the price, which, at two hundred lire, was after all reasonable for the bad offchance of a Pinturicchio. One can hardly dignify such elementary guile by the name of forgery. Yet there are moments of twilight exhaustion at the end of a day’s hunting when a varnished color print will take in the collector who ordinarily knows better.

Old objects improved are a peculiarly insidious class of forgery. Imagine a minor Umbrian panel of Perugino’s time and style. A few opportune touches by a skilled restorer will make it, commercially speaking, into a Perugino. Its price goes up from three thousand dollars to thirty thousand. The surface is mostly old, looks right under the lens, meets the usual tests. If put in a corner, the dealer has only to tell the truth — that the picture is somewhat repainted. An entire collection of such improved pictures was brought over here about twenty-five years ago, and is gradually revealing its true character as the repaint is removed. Happily the X-ray, which generally tells the extent and age of the repainting, affords a new safeguard against this dangerous type of fraud.

IV

So far we have had only the ‘low down’ on our subject, but it is after all a fitting approach, for human foibles and vanities do not greatly change their character when they appear in superior individuals and in sublimated form. The psychology of my modest maker of Ryders and of Signor Dossena is the same. Nothing is different but the prices their works respectively have fetched. And this difference of price is created, not by the forger, but by the dealer, amateur, and museum official — is, in short, a phase of the psychology of the art market and not of the psychology of the artist.

The potential forger of works of art is first of all a passionate antiquarian; next he is a craftsman; and finally he is poor. For the beautiful objects which he is destined to simulate he must have a reverent admiration. His work, however, will generally show that he has really studied his favorite originals quite superficially. His enthusiasm is diffused and vague, sufficient to itself, and does not induce that concentration which study demands. Were he in easy circumstances, the potential forger would become instead an active collector, and probably incidentally an amateur artist. One may be sure that as a collector he would buy many forgeries, lacking the safeguard of a studious habit, and that his art would he negligible. But since he has no money with which to buy antiques, but has a pair of clever hands by which he must live, he makes the antiques instead. In the first instance he makes them for his own pleasure, as an artist; but, since he must live, he sells them — puts on the market an ambiguous production which a little aging or a timely misrepresentation will convert into a forgery. As a forgery, it is worth much more than it is as his avowed work.

At this point the dealers will try to take him on, and they will generally succeed, for their pressure is hard to resist. They can present him with an accomplished fact for which he is not responsible — that his works are being sold as originals. To explain the situation is to spoil his at best uncertain market; to say nothing is to enjoy a relative prosperity. In this dilemma he is likely to wash his hands of the fate of his w ork after it leaves the studio, shifting any blame involved to the dealer, who is obviously answerable for his own stock, and to the buyer, who is supposed to know what he is about. Thus, without any positive evil intention, if not quite innocently, a producing antiquarian is converted into a forger. This I suppose to be Signor Dossena’s case.

Were the same sort of man not a craftsman, he would probably keep an old curiosity shop, assembling mostly specious rubbish, and indulging the most gorgeous delusions about his wares. For the man who deceives by superficial appearances cares for them greatly, and is himself readily deceived by them. I have known many antiquity dealers of this kidney, of whom one was an occasional forger. They all lived in a haze of hopefulness concerning the most hopeless objects. Their admirations were ready and volatile, but entirely undisciplined. They cared for some good things without at all knowing why one was better than the other, and they invariably loved a fine thing for a bad or merely secondary reason.

Now suppose such a man is an excellent craftsman and has to live by his craft. His art at best will be an enthusiastic but generally not very intelligent imitation of the things he loves. Or, in the rare event that he is scholarly, his imitation will be careful and correct, and rather dry. It is the temperamental and irresponsible forgery that is really dangerous. Under favorable financial and moral conditions, a producing archaeologist may remain such. We have had a Bastianini and an Ioni pursuing their work with a kind of amateur zeal. In a higher walk of production we have the greatest of creative archæologists, Mr. Ralph Adams Cram, retouching our campuses and countrysides with a Gothic architecture which is as plausible archæologically as it is preposterous from the point of view of our national history. Had Mr. Cram lacked that extraordinary energy and adroitness which have brought him success and fame, I am sure we should find him enthusiastically carving wood or ivory or painting miniatures in the Gothic style — an American Ioni or Bastianini.

We shall do well to shift our attention from the forger, who, as we have seen, is only incidentally so, to the producing archaeologist, who is the psychological reality involved in our problem. For him the Dossena case has evoked a generous championship. The plea runs as follows: Signor Dossena’s work—say, the ‘Mino da Fiesole’ tomb bought by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts — has been accepted by great experts as an exceptionally beautiful Mino. In that capacity it has thrilled admiring thousands, most of whom, being Bostonians, are presumably good judges of the beautiful. Does it not then follow that the tomb is a real aesthetic equivalent for a fine Mino, hence quite worth the great sum paid for it, and a desirable acquisition for any museum devoted to the cult of the beautiful? And if this be so, is it not a mere snobbishness that makes us repudiate the sculptor and his work? If our taste were set on aesthetic realities and untrammeled by fallacies of historic remoteness and of consecrated names, should we not rather hail Signor Dossena as an artist equal to Mino, and commend the experts of the Museum for adding one of his masterpieces to the collections? So runs the plea, and it has as well an interesting sophistication: Signor Dossena is a very great sculptor who has had the bad luck to be born out of his proper time — to wit, the Italian Renaissance.

I am reluctant to combat so magnanimous an argument. Let me rather, provisionally accepting it, extend it to its logical limits, and then see where we are. Signor Dossena’s work has equally seemed the finest product of archaic Magna Græcia, of early fourteenthcentury Italy, of fifteenth-century Italy. If his champions are right, he actually commands in his proper person the perfect ions of two great schools and of four generations widely spaced in time. In short, he must be the greatest sculptor the world has ever seen. No other sculptor has been preëminent except in the style of his own time. Evidently the plea is bad if you push it all the way. And the corollary is also bad. Signor Dossena has had the signal misfortune to be born outside of at least four generations all of which would have been equally proper for his peculiar genius. Again this won’t do. His genius must indeed be of a very special nature, and possibly more persuasive than really great. All this will come out more clearly as we pass from the psychology of the forger to the character of his work.

V

A blatant and insistent charm is the essential characteristic of every successful forgery. As I recall the halfdozen times I have been taken in, the false object excited me more, had more ‘kick,’ than any authentic masterpiece ever has. The forgery was aggressively effective, completely engrossing. It was oddly self-subsistent, failing to evoke the usual analogies with kindred masterpieces. It demanded to be accepted instanter, for itself alone, and did not consent to be compared with anything else. It filled one’s entire aesthetic horizon.

Now the masterpiece never has these overtly prima-donna manners. It does not, in the vigorous parlance of modern youth, ‘knock you dead.’ It keeps a certain aloofness, waits in dignity upon your recognition and understanding, leaves you a leeway for reflection and comparison, reserves much of its beauty for further acquaintance, gains as you study it. In short, the appreciation of a masterpiece of art is in the nature of a courtship, whereas the appreciation of a forgery is in the nature of a rape consented to.

I recall buying the false Sassetta with one of the best connoisseurs in the country at my elbow egging me on. We fell for it instantly and unreservedly, as a superlatively delightful thing. With a real Sassetta we should both have been more circumspect. Respect and reflection would have tempered expansive adoration. This immediate kick all the Dossenas have in a remarkable degree. One of the archaic Greek simulations is said to have been bought because its beauty made the responsible curator tremble. It would have been well if this expert had recalled that he did not tremble when he approached the metopes of Olympia and the Ludovisi throne. The great masterpieces do not assail the nerves to this extent. In short, the forgery is to the masterpiece what absinthe is to an authentic drink. It raises you suddenly very high, and as quickly lets you down. It gives all it has on the instant and has no force in reserve.

It was so with the first Dossenas I saw about eight years ago. They have since been in and again out of the collection of a celebrated journalist. They were marble high reliefs, an Annunciation, purporting to be by the Sienese painter-sculptor Vecchietta. They possessed me utterly, seemed the loveliest Italian sculptures I had ever seen. My response was abject. As I went away I had a curious feeling of being ashamed, of wishing to take it all back. I recalled that before the masterpieces of Quercia, Donatello, Ghiberti, Desiderio, Luca della Robbia, I had never been lashed into such an abandon of adoration. And Vecchietta, supposing the Annunciation to be his, though a charming artist in his degree, was after all only a good third-rate artist. Why should he shatter me as no firstrate sculptor had ever managed to do? Something was wrong — with me or the marbles, or with both.

After a month I saw the Annunciation again. It still looked lovely, but less so, and it betrayed its secret. It had never been conceived in stone, but cautiously cut in marble from photographs or similar graphic material. It had no sculptural quality. You could have ironed it out flat, and it would have lost nothing; indeed it might even gain if flattened and colored. It was a transcript of a charming picture in marble. It had no real existence, though it had a momentary power to enthrall.

Still a few years later I saw in a famous New York collection another enticing pair of marbles, again an Annunciation, this time by no less a hand than that of the great Sienese painter, Simone Martini. I had had my lesson, and had only to read it over in a new connection. Once more it was plainly a case of photographs blown out into sculpture. Putting two and two together, it did not require the shrewdness of a Sherlock Holmes to infer that somewhere there was a clever forger who drew his inspiration from photographs; and in succeeding years, as I noted the papery character of one alleged masterpiece after another, the conviction of one maker grew. Indeed the case was so obvious that I felt little elation when it turned out that it was Signor Dossena’s habit to feed his fancy from photographs before designing freely in their style.

I have cited this personal experience of infatuation and disillusionment because I am sure that it is entirely typical. There is still due an explanation of this instantaneously captivating power of the forgery. It is grounded naturally in the psychology, in the taste, of the forger himself. He gives what he himself sees and understands in the masterpiece — namely, its superficial mannerisms. He unconsciously selects from it what is most easily grasped, and leaves out what needs penetrating study. He captures the charm but not the content. He probably understands the epidermis of a masterpiece better than the best critic or most experienced amateur, but he does not understand or even wish to understand its organism or the psychic experience that underlies and guides the creative act. If he could understand these things, he would be not a forger, but a master in his own right.

If this analysis be correct, it answers the questions, Can the forger be a great artist, and can the forgery be a great work of art ? Neit her case is admissible in theory, and neither has ever occurred in fact. Bastianini, we have seen, was a producing archaeologist, and not a forger. His best portraits in the Renaissance style were as good aesthetically as fair second-rate Renaissance sculptures. His sculpture in the style of his own times was entirely mediocre. His gift was a specialized one. In a higher degree the forger’s talent is restricted to simulation of other men’s styles. I have seen nothing of Dossena’s in the contemporary manner, but it is safe to predict that he will never bulk large among his fellow Italian sculptors.

However, every good forgery has a certain æsthetic merit, with the drawback that it looks better than it really is. I have kept for nearly twenty years a still-life which is pretty certainly a forgery of a Manet, because it has always given me the pristine pleasure. My friend, the late John G. Johnson, most catholic of picture collectors, bought several forgeries and invariably kept them on his walls after the fraud had been exposed. He used to say that he had bought them, not for their name or even for their honesty, but because he liked them, and he still liked them. Such an attitude is exceptional, since the forgery ordinarily goes off under acquaintance and falls below the standard of the collection. Still there are cases where a good forgery may be aesthetically superior to a poor original of the same type. But if these cases are probed I believe they will generally fall rather under producing archaeology than under intentional forgery.

Every man of sensitive and confident taste is potentially the forger’s victim. The same audacity that bids him surrender himself to an unaccredited masterpiece delivers him unconditionally to its counterfeit. It is the exceptional amateur who does not leap at a forgery of a new type. But the amateur or expert who is most readily fooled by forgeries and stays fooled longest is he who overvalues the kick which he receives from a work of art, and fails to perceive that one kick differs from another in glory. It is the connoisseur who, to mix metaphors, never goes behind his kick who is oftenest and longest in trouble.

Now the immediate and unquestioning response to beauty is the most essential faculty for the connoisseur. Without it he is nowhere. If to this native gift he has added experience, his first impression should be right in, say, nineteen out of twenty cases. But the twentieth case is serious when it concerns forgeries paid for in six figures. What is the safeguard?

The primary safeguard is a critique of kick. I am satisfied that the emotional response to a forgery has an abandon and exaggeration that may be sensed at the time and is different qualitatively from the more disciplined response to a masterpiece. This difference I have tried to elucidate above. In the other arts we readily admit the distinction. One was more thrilled at hearing Lillian Russell sing ‘Starlight’ than at hearing Sembrich sing the ‘Spinning Song,’ but one also knew how to discount the bigger but emphatically not better thrill. Any selfcritical and honest devotee of the arts will admit that he has often been moved more imperiously by a poor performance than he ever has been by a great performance. There are occasions when the battalion bugler tootling colors will chill your spinal marrow more effectively than any great orchestra has ever done. These are such matters of common experience in all the auditive arts that it is surprising such experiences in the visual arts remain unclassified and almost unnoted.

At least the amateur can study in advance the especial conditions under which he is going to be exposed to kick, and can be made to realize that the nature of the kick will often depend on these conditions. For example, the richest man in the world can view Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ disinterestedly. He cannot buy it, and he cannot prevent a rival from buying it. He cannot see Titian’s ‘Three Ages,’ in an historic English gallery, with quite the same tranquillity. It might conceivably be sold. He might by some Nelsonic coup snatch it from a rival. Now suppose he sees at a dealer’s a Titian apparently equivalent to these masterpieces, sees it alone before plush curtains, under a spotlight, with a mellifluous dealer chanting an appropriate obligato, is assured that it is shown first to him, but that a rival collector is deeply interested in it and cannot long be held off—here are conditions that make for a maximum of kick and also suggest plainly that the kick should be referred to afterthought and measured by all objective controls.

It is the fiercely competitive spirit among collectors and museums that breeds the forgery. It makes buyers act in a panic lest they lose a unique opportunity. It forces them to premature decisions in affairs that require deliberation. The purchase is made not merely to get the object itself, but to keep a rival collector or museum from getting it. One may be sure that but for the existence of the great Eastern museums and of Chicago, the staff at Cleveland would have found the half minute required to measure the proportions of Dossena’s gigantic Athena — proportions unexampled in any early Greek sculpture. And, but for the phantom of the Metropolitan Museum, the staff of the Boston Museum would have found the hour necessary to prove that the heraldry of the ‘Mino’ tomb was preposterously unhistorical. Or, if they lacked the books and the herald, they would at least have written a letter to the accomplished herald of the Metropolitan Museum. A delay of two days and a two-cent stamp would have saved a considerable humiliation, not to mention a sum reckoned in six figures.

VI

While the real defense against the forger is a critique and analysis of situations and aesthetic responses, a most valuable auxiliary is archaeology. In itself archaeology cannot tell you whether a given object is a masterpiece or a botch, but it can usually tell you within a quarter century when the piece was made. And this it does, not from total impression, but by objective tests. Compared with the enthusiast who trembles before a masterpiece, authentic or forged, the archaeologist, peering myopically about its corners with his lens, seems a mean, ungenerous worm. But he has the chronological goods. He catches an anachronism quickly; he is used to distinguishing the gradual abrasion of mother earth from that of the sand blast; he knows the difference between a crackle baked in an hour and one that has come through the centuries. In short, he commands all the objective knowledge there is in these matters, and while he may seem an unsympathetic fellow for the inspirational connoisseur, he is all the same a valuable ally, and it pays to consult him, for in every forgery, however carefully concealed, there is an archæological solecism.

One of the most alarming features of the Dossena scandal is that prominent American museums make capital purchases without archaeological checks of any sort. To be sure, there are not enough American archaeologists to man our museums, but there are enough to supply advice when it is needed. Only two professional archaeologists accepted Dossena’s sculpture, and they stood against many. The pieces were cert ified and approved rather by dealers, agents, collectors, and foreign museum officials, all so deeply involved in the art market that whatever scholarship they possessed was subject to those commercial and competitive aberrations which I have already described. Where a museum commanded archaeological knowledge, its defense against the Dossenas was adequate. This was true of the Metropolitan Museum alone. To be sure, the Museum bought a little Greek marble, reasonably trusting in a minor purchase a veteran agent, one of the two archaeologists whom I have mentioned above. But when the statue arrived, it did not satisfy the curator and the staff, and it has been withheld from exhibition as ambiguous. In archaeology, as elsewhere, two heads are better than one.

The root of all this evil is the fallacy of commercial rarity. Of the idols of the market place it is the most insidious. The minor forger will probably always thrive, for the small collector will ever be willing to pay for his hopes, at a safe price. The great forger of Signor Dossena’s type will only cease to operate successfully when collectors and curators learn to consider mere rarity only after they shall have dealt with the primary issues of quality and period. To quality there is no safe and objective guide. But study, second thought, comparison, and self-analysis will obviate most of the dangers and uncertainties of an essentially mystical judgment. For period there is safe and objective guidance in archeology, and obviously all the objective tests there are should be applied before one accepts the mystical verdict of beautiful as a finality, or commits himself to the troubled waters of titanic competition. Put mere rarity in third order of thought, and the best forgeries will knock at gallery doors in vain.

We naturally seek material cures for ills that are spiritual. They seem easy. Such remedies are even written into national constitutions. A cure of this sort has been proposed for that libido which is caught by forgeries — namely, a great museum of forgeries of all periods. Such a collection would be very interesting in itself. Many museums already exhibit the forgeries they have acquired. If I ever get enough to make the display worth while, I shall do this at Princeton, and meanwhile I am ready to show the modest beginnings of such a collection to any interested person. But such a collection of false masterpieces would not, in my opinion, keep anybody from buying the new forgeries as they come along. It would merely help the uninformed amateur to eschew the falsifications that have been classified and discredited. This sort is not really dangerous. As to new forgeries, it would be no more easy for a museum of fakes to identify them for acquisition than it is for any museum to identify them now for purposes of exclusion. It is the first encounter that is perilous and needs to be safeguarded. And, since the transaction is on the plane of spirit, it admits only of spiritual controls.

Whoever approaches these incalculable ordeals without vanity of opinion and without ambition to outdo another is already well armed, and if he adds to these graces of character long experience and a Socratic self-knowledge, his defense against the forger should be nearly impenetrable.