Forgery Art

We are now beginning to work under the assumption that the Lady of Elche is indeed a strictly modern forgery. Any art forgery must be assumed to have been done with due deliberation. If these assumptions are warranted in the case of the Lady of Elche, it automatically follows that, in the broader sense, we are also dealing with a "crime," and that, as felonious wrongdoing, it would almost inevitably have had to have been done with "malice aforethought." The three fundamental circumstances that need clarification when any crime, human or artistic, is to be investigated are means, motive, and opportunity. That is, in short, the nature of the investigative process; but first, whatever the nature of a purported felony, any criminal prosecutor worth his salt knows that he must deal with the corpus delicti, meaning that he must first establish the very existence of the misdeed. Having done that, the most difficult task of all, he must proceed to name the principals involved, provide a reasonable motivation for their heinous act, and recover, as best as possible, the means of its execution. Then the public prosecutor is further obliged to furnish to the jury (in this case, the reader), who is expected to render an impartial verdict, a plausibly detailed reconstruction of the modus operandi of the culprit or perpetrators.

Forgery, as should be made clear at the outset, has spread its malevolent influence throughout the ages. It is hard today to determine which came first, literary or artistic fakes. Given the importance of the Word, in the scriptural sense, one suspects that written (or initially just verbalized) forgeries preceded plastic ones. Whatever the medium, the appearance of forgery is provoked by circumstances of varying sorts, some of which I shall examine, and it has been practiced by individuals of an extraordinary range of technical capabilities and intellectual capacities, from the highest to the lowest.

The desire to fabricate feloniously can infect almost anyone; forgery evidently tempts the previously virtuous as well as the unfailingly weak soul or innate ethical defective. The motives of the forger have varied as widely as those of any other kind of creative artist. In some cases, careerism seems to have been a powerful stimulant; a previously and consistently failed artist finds that he may gain fame with rather similar work put on the market with the timely application of a different provenance or denomination. With like motivations, frustration and disillusionment, others have forged from something like vindictiveness. In other cases, however, the impulse seems less materialistic, even whimsical. For instance, the sadistic pleasure derived from seeing others duped, Schadenfreude, seems a prevalent form of psychological gratification, particularly since the Renaissance.

The corpus delicti of this case, the Lady of Elche, reveals in a classic fashion the stereotypical modus operandi of the skilled and knowledgeable art forger. Max J. Friedlaender was also well aware of the fact that, when dealing with a suspected art forgery, "the connoisseur becomes a criminologist." Like many other experts, he observed that the key to solving the riddle of any suspected art forgery is the necessary realization that, whatever the period-style that is imitated, "the forger is an imposter and a child of his time, one who employs the method of vision which is natural to him. . . . Oscillating between uneasy cautiousness and brazenness, [he is] afraid lest his own voice may grow too loud and betray him."