Forgery, Imitation, Emulation: the Creation of Antiquity in the Renaissance

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The database of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance connects antiquarian drawings and the ancient works that inspired them, making these relationships comprehensible and accessible for contemporary art history and archaeology. Sometimes, however, the ‘Antique Monuments’ depicted in these drawings, if they do not completely elude identification, reveal themselves to be Early Modern works of art that were modelled on the antique in their content or theme. Either mistakenly, or deliberately, they were said during the Renaissance era to be ‘antique’ objects. Given the increasing ability of many artists in the 16th century to create their own works in the style of a glorified antique ideal, to copy surviving antiquities, or to supplement antique objects in collections with modern works, this is hardly surprising. It goes some way in explaining why many objects in museums today are of disputed date, and are judged to be either antique or 16th-century.¹

Some of these works of art that were said to be antique can perhaps justifiably be described as ‘fake’ antiquities. Others are copies, or simply imitations in an antique style, while there are also Early Modern works in which antique components are used as recycled materials. Such objects initially appear to elude unambiguous inclusion in the Census database, as they do not represent Antique Monuments in the truest sense. At the same time, however, they were known as ‘antique’ works of art in the Renaissance, and there are drawings and documents from the Early Modern period that declare these contemporary works to be ‘antiquities’. They cannot therefore simply be categorised as ‘Postclassical Works’ within the Census framework, as their Renaissance ‘antique’ status would be obscured, and Antique Monuments and Postclassical Works would not be able to be represented in a binary relationship, following the Census data model.

Expanding the Definition of ‘Antique Monument’

Census card of the Apollo Belvedere, London, Warburg Institute Photographic Collection

The Census, when it was led by the archaeologist Phyllis Pray Bober after she began working on the project in 1947, originally presented Antique Monuments only unilaterally in their relationship to its postclassical ‘documentation’, that is, the literary and pictorial sources from the Renaissance that respond to each antiquity. This method was chosen in accordance with Richard Krautheimer’s project outline for the Census sent to Fritz Saxl in 1946. The entries collected in the form of index cards were labelled with the name of the Antique Monument, while Renaissance documentation was listed below.

‘Forged’ antiquities, conceptions of the antiquity by Renaissance artists that did not have a clear, identifiable model, as well as all’antica inventions were left out of the Census, in accordance with the aims of the founders. Bober commented on this topic in 1963:

I do not concern myself with seeking out individual poses in, let us say, Renaissance paintings, because artists may either arrive at these independently or reactivate an ultimately classical prototype transmitted in medieval guise. It is rather the testimony of direct copying or adaptation, of groups of figures or complete compositions, which has reliable documentary value for the Census²

The all’antica creations of the Renaissance are still not included in the Census database: this category is simply too large and all-encompassing, What the Census can (and already does) include, however, are works of art that were once regarded as antique in the Renaissance. The digitisation of the Census in the 1980s established a data model for the Census that placed the categories ‘Antique Monuments’ and ‘Postclassical Documents’ in a mirror relationship with one another: Antique Monuments are referenced by Postclassical Documents, and the categories are kept separate from one another. Over the years of its development, however, the Census has included in the category ‘Antique Monument’ antique objects that are restored, or otherwise manipulated in the Early Modern period  This category, in other words, is already ambiguous.

By embracing this ambiguity, the category ‘Antique Monument’ can be expanded to include not only as works that are genuinely antique, but also objects were once regarded as ‘antique’ in the Renaissance. In April, 2023, when the Census database was released on a new platform (FYLR), the two categories ‘Antique Monuments’ and ‘Postclassical Documents’ were reconsidered. One important change was that ‘Postclassical Documents’ were re-named ‘Postclassical Works’, a shift that was meant to underscore the independent status of these works as creative instances of antique reception. The re-definition of this category included an expanded art-historical approach to the antique drawings in the Census database, as an article in this blog by Clara Sawatzki considers in more detail.

At the same time, Kathleen Christian also made the decision to define in a more accurate way the category ‘Antique Monuments’. According to the Census Semantic Data Models, CSDM, this category is now described as:

In the Census, Antique Monuments are antique inscriptions, coins, paintings, sculptures, architectural monuments and other ancient artefacts and works of art. In some cases, Antique Monuments can also be works of art and architecture which are not antique, but were believed in the Renaissance to be antique.

The Census, then, is not only concerned with the reception of genuinely antique works, but also of works which were restored, or were somehow considered ‘ancient’ in the Renaissance and were thus part of the concept of ‘antiquity’ from the perspective of the Early Modern period. A contemporary, archaeological assessment of whether a work can be considered ancient or not is replaced by an assessment from the vantage point of the Early Modern period, when it can be discerned and defined.

In the context of the Census, the attribution of a work of art or a monument based on its moment of creation is sometimes difficult: not only because each object has a history of use and transformation, loss and addition over the course of time, but also because insights about the objects in question change over time and transform their status. It is not uncommon for contradictory statements to exist in parallel. The Census, however, should not be concerned with determining a definitive classification. Instead it should be concerned with making the relationship between ancient monuments and their reception in the Renaissance visible. Unlike classical archaeology, it should aim to understand the term ‘antique’ as a relative concept, for which the perspective of reception is central, and which can change over time.

Thus the rare case that an Early Modern work of art is included in the Census as an Antique Monument,  the “Date of Creation” field will indicate more than one date: an archaeological date that reflects the current state of research, and a date that originates from Renaissance interpretation. For inclusion in the Census as an Antique Monument, there should be a citeable source for the Renaissance perception, belief, or assertion that a particular work was ‘ancient’. The Renaissance dating should thus be documented by reference to a drawing, inscription, observation, or text from among the Postclassical Works in the Census database. 

The Sleeping Eros: A Postclassical Work as an Antique Monument

Census Database, Record for CensusID 12020429

One such example is a Sleeping Eros with Lion Skin and Club, inv. 288 of the Museo di Antichità in Turin. The 23 cm high, 72 cm long marble sculpture, made in classicising style, shows Eros lying on a lion’s skin with the club of Heracles. The Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin and Club, now assigned to the early 16th century and attributed to Tommaso della Porta, was until recently dated to the Hadrianic-Antonine period and was thought to be a copy of a late Hellenistic Greek original.³ A glance at the toes of the Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin indicates that the ‘antique’ dating was intended by the artist, or by the dealer of the sculpture (with an awareness of the famous case of Michelangelo’s Cupid).

There are fine incisions in the sculpture that simulate breaks, as if the statue has been restored. The mutilation of a toe also points to a deliberate faking of the Cupid’s age and thus identify the sculpture as a veritable forgery.⁴ It cannot be ruled out that there may have once been an ancient model for the modern work that has since been lost, which was copied along with its breaks, but this would contradict the goal of Renaissance antiquarians and artists to revive antiquity in its original splendour wherever possible⁵. It is more likely that the staged breaks help to ‘prove’ its age and alleviate any doubts about its status as an antiquity. That these efforts may well have been successful is shown by the inclusion of the sculpture in the drawing collection of the Spanish Renaissance antiquarian, Alonso Chacón (1530-1599), latinized as Alphonsus Ciacconius.

Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid, which the agent Baldassare del Milanese tried to sell as an antiquity in Rome in 1496⁶, was eventually exhibited opposite an antique Sleeping Cupid attributed to Praxiteles in the Grotta of Isabella d’Este.⁷. Juxtaposition with an antique Cupid earned wide recognition for Michelangelo’s sculpture, so that the Cupid became proof of Michelangelo’s special gifts. It may not come as a surprise that the Turin Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin and Club was at times thought to be Michelangelo’s lost Cupid, or that (as Anna Maria Riccomini has argued) it seems to have been exhibited opposite an antique Sleeping Eros. This antique Eros is the statue now in Turin thought to be the only surviving copy of an original composition by Praxiteles. The antique Young Sleeping Eros could have been displayed as a companion piece for the Early Modern Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin and Club in the collection of the Savoy Dukes in Turin, staging a dialogue between antiquity and Renaissance⁴ in the spirit of Michelangelo’s Cupid and Isabella d’Este’s display of Michelangelo’s sculpture and the Cupid attributed to Praxiteles.

The inclusion of the Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin into the Census as an Antique Monument is due to its significance for research on the reception of antiquity in the Early Modern era. While on the one hand, its inclusion complicates the concept of antiquity, the category of ‘Antique Monument’, and the concept of an unambiguous approach to a historical antiquity,⁸ it also offers a more accurate perspective on the antiquity that was ‘known to the Renaissance’, recognising the possibility of multiple opinions about an object’s status as an ‘antiquity’, both then and now. What all’antica objects, or ‘forged’ antiquities like the Turin Eros are able to convey is a concrete view on the Renaissance art market and the social and socio-economic circumstances of the production and reception of these artefacts. Herlitz and Fried point out in an article on fake antiquities and their value for art history in 2022,

As forgeries in general aim to imitate the most sought-after artefacts of a period, they can be seen as a manifestation of the foremost taste, style and subjects of bygone times and should thus appeal to the many proponents of studies of art history in our time.⁹

The authors conclude that anyone who produces a forgery is particularly concerned with the taste of their own time and the wishes of collectors and dealers. Mark Jones voiced a similar argument  in 1990 in his plea for the re-evaluation of fake art for art historical purposes under the title ‘Why Fakes?’. Here Jones described forgeries as portraits of a changing market and of the human desires at work within it.¹⁰. ‘Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most’.¹¹ At the same time, as Barbara Furlotti emphasises in an article on Renaissance numismatic forgeries, a more precise understanding of the production, circulation, and reception of forgeries also provides insight into the way in which antiquarians, collectors, and artists related to antiquity.¹² ‘Forgeries’ reveal not only an interest in the past, but also an understanding of the temporality of objects that in some respects may diverge from that of the present. This is a thesis put forward by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood in their book Anachronic Renaissance.¹³ 

By referring to artefacts, images, monuments, and architecture as ‘tokens of types’, they attribute to the Early Modern period an understanding of historical objects that extends into the past through ‘chains of substitution’, in which each object is replaceable.¹⁴ While a church, for example, can be repeatedly renovated, redesigned, or even rebuilt, it always remains old and always the same, venerable structure. According to Nagel and Wood, this view was also applied to paintings until the emergence of the ‘performative model’ of creation and authorship during the course of the 15th century.¹⁵ It was only when authorship and thus the moment of creation of a work of art became the focal point for artistic value that the concepts of originality and forgery as we know them could fully emerge. Nagel and Wood thus describe the emergence of the category of art forgery as the result of two competing models of history,¹⁶ which, channeled through the art market itself, ultimately culminated in accusations of fraud.¹⁷

Census, the Digitisation of Ciacconius’ Albums, and Ubi Erat Lupa

Tommaso della Porta?, Sleeping Eros with a Lion’s Skin and Club, Turin, Museo di Antichità, inv. 288, Census ID #12020429, detail. Photo: Ortolf Harl

Tommaso della Porta?, Sleeping Eros with a Lion’s Skin and Club, Turin, Museo di Antichità, inv. 288, Census ID #12020429, detail. Photo: Ortolf Harl

Although the Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin and Club is an Early Modern sculpture, it is included in the Census under the heading Antique Monument due to its former status as a possible ‘antiquity’. In the Creation Date field in the Census record, two dates are given: ‘1st half of 16th cent.’ is the date ‘attributed by current scholarship’, while a second date, ‘antique’, is the date ‘attributed in Renaissance’. The source for this attribution of an antique date is then given under References or Sources: the drawing from the collection of Alphonsus Ciacconius folio 267 v of the codex of Ciacconius in the Biblioteca Angelica, Codex MS. 1564. 

The drawings commissioned by Ciacconius in Rome between 1567 and 1590 (over 800) make up one of the largest coherent corpora of archaeological drawings and commentaries of the 16th century. The drawings, which had hardly been researched until 2015 and were largely unpublished, were given new life by archaeologist Prof. Dr. Christiane Vorster, who carried out an multi-year project on the drawings, after a previously-overlooked album of drawings by Ciacconius in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, inventory number H27-32, aroused her interest. In three project phases, Vorster and her team digitized the albums, made them philologically accessible and entered them into the Arachne database/iDAI.objects of the German Archaeological Institute. Several conferences and publications integrated the project into a larger discourse about the reception of antiquity in the early modern period. And while previously only 17 of the approximately 800 known drawings in Ciacconius’s albums were present in the Census, it was important to incorporate Vorster’s research into the database, including the many new identifications of ancient monuments represented in the Ciacconius drawings in connection with the 2018 publication Die Antikenalben des Alphonsus Ciacconius in Braunschweig, Rom und Pesaro: Dokumentation und Deutung antiker Skulpturen im 16. Jahrhundert. In this context, not only were drawings from Corpus Ciacconianum included into the Census, but also numerous ancient monuments. New photographs from the Biblioteca Angelica album have, as well, recently been added to the Census database.

When the Census collaborated in 2024 with Frederike and Ortolf Harl, directors of the archaeological database Ubi Erat Lupa, to take photographs of antiquities in the Museo Reali in Turin for inclusion in the Census, it was the high-resolution detailed photographs of the Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin and Club in particular that confirmed the value of bespoke photography for the Census’s purpose and its perspective on antique objects. The photographs made it possible to visualise the ambivalence of the sculpture as an early modern ‘antiquity’ on the basis of details visible in the artwork itself. They lay a valuable foundation for further research and discussion, based for the first time on high-quality images of the ‘pseudo-antique’ elements of the statue, and can be enriched by connections to the drawing in the Ciacconius album. Here we would like to express our sincere thanks to the Harls, the museum in Turin and also to Christiane Vorster, who supported this photographic commission in an advisory capacity.

Ciacconius, who endeavoured to compile a complete collection of drawings of ancient sculpture in Rome, had the Eros drawn for his Antiquitates Romanae in the second half of the sixteenth century, when it was  in the possession of Tommaso della Porta.  The drawing that has come down to us in the Codex MS 1564 thus serves as a source for the ascription of an ‘antique’ status to the object in the Renaissance.

The drawings were dedicated to the antiquities of Rome, as is indicated by the title Antiquities Romanae; some works were modern, such as the Sleeping Eros with a Lion Skin, or partially modern, yet nevertheless included in the compilation.¹⁸ The ambitious project was planned to be a compendium of the antiquities of Rome, probably for future publication in print.¹⁹ The drawing of the Sleeping Eros in Ciacconius’s manuscript does not specifically date the sculpture; only very rarely do the inscriptions in Ciacconius’s albums reference the status of a work of art as ‘antique’ or modern, for example in the collection of drawings in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Brunswick, H27-32, where he indicates on folio 103 recto under the drawing of a sarcophagus relief: 

Romae apud Thoma(m) a Porta scalptore(m) // marmo(rum) ex a(n)tiquo marmoreo fragme(n)to.²⁰

Here the relief, that was documented in the collection of Tommaso della Porta,²¹) is described as an ancient marble fragment. However, the fact that this annotation must have seemed unnecessary is underlined by the fact that another drawing of the same sarcophagus relief, illustrated on folio 005 recto of the Ciacconius album in Braunschweig, here without any further reference to the antique status of the relief:

Sacrificiu(m) Aesculapio factu(m) Romae // apud Thoma(m) a Porta scalptore(m) marmo(rum),²²

Thus, despite the absence of a specific date for the Sleeping Eros in Ciacconius’s manuscript, its inclusion in this collection of Roman antiquities is sufficient to indicate a conception of this work as ‘antique’ by the Renaissance scholar. 

As Nagel and Wood describe the general imprecision of explicit dating in Renaissance research on antiquity,

There is no evidence to indicate that the keenest critics of ancient art […] ever concerned themselves with the precise dating of ancient objects.²³

As an example, they cite the case of the Paduan humanist Niccolò Leonico Tomeo who, confronted with a portrait head of Socrates that was up for sale, was not concerned with its date or the question of whether it was an authentic antiquity, but rather with its resemblance of the portrait to other surviving images of Soocrates.²⁴

An Unlikely Find: A Bust Identified as Vitellius

In the Renaissance, rather than archaeological methodology or stylistic comparisons, but the partially subjective comparison with written sources was important when judging the worth of portrait busts. Accordingly, the Physiognomonica, a treatise of pseudo-Aristotelian origin on the physiognomic correspondence of facial features and character²⁵ based on stories and descriptions of the character of Roman emperors, was regarded as an adequate source for determining  the quality of a portrait bust, alongside comparison with portraits on antique coins.²⁶ The enormous number of all’antica imperial busts, or antique busts that were misidentified, shows the inaccuracy of this type of collecting in the Early Modern period.

One such example is the marble bust of a Pseudo-Vitellius with the inventory number 240, also in the Museo Reali in Turin, which was drawn for Ciacconius’s Antiquitates Romanae when it was in the house of Giovanni Francesco Garimberto. The detailed drawing in two chalk techniques on folio 177 recto of Codex MS. 1564 of the Biblioteca Angelica shows the bust together with several annotations, not all of which refer to the work depicted. At the top, the bust is identified as a marble statue of Emperor Vitellius.²⁷ This identification seems reasonable on the basis of a famous bust in the Museo Archeologico in Venice with inventory number 20 (called Grimani-Vitellius), which is very similar to the one depicted here, yet the Grimani-Vitellius was itself not an authoritative, antique source.

Aulus Vitellius (12/15-69 CE) was defeated by Vespasian and murdered in 69 CE. The portraits created during his reign, which lasted only a few months, soon fell victim to the damnatio memoriae imposed by his rival Vespasian which means that there are few survivals of his antique image.²⁸ Yet in the sixteenth century, demand increased for rare and almost impossible finds of portraits that had been obliterated by damnatio memoriae.  Renaissance scholars of antiquity also became increasingly interested in the emperor Vitellius, who ruled only briefly and unsuccessfully.²⁹ This interest may be linked above all to the description of his character by the Roman writer Suetonius as a formerly handsome and tall man who, as a result of excessive indulgence and drunkenness, took on ‘the appearance of an old glutton’.³⁰ And although the portrait based on the type of the Grimani Vitellius did not really correspond to surviving portraits on coins, the figure’s features, with his double chin and slightly bloated appearance, were thought to depict the character of Vitellius so accurately that the image was given this identification.³¹

The popularity of the Grimani Vitellius and the general acceptance of the identification of the exquisite portrait were probably sufficient grounds, even for Garimberto, not to doubt the authenticity of the Vitellius portrait now in Turin. However, its status as an antiquity has long since been debated by archaeologists³². While Eberhard Paul, for example, shares the thesis with many archaeologists of the last hundred and fifty years that the Grimani Vitellius represents a portrait type invented in the 16th century,³³ Klaus Fittschen rescued the antique status of the work in an article of  2006, in which he recognised a senator from Hadrianic times in the portrait in question.³⁴

Aureus of Vitellius, 69 CE

The sculpture that became the famous prototype of Vitellius’s portraiture by projecting the reception of his character traits evolved into one of the most frequently copied imperial portraits of the 16th and 17th centuries, and could not be missing from any collection of the ‘Suetonius’ emperors.³⁵ The popularity of the portrait derived from the symbolism of the ruler as a man who had fallen prey to gluttony, thereby serving as a negative example.²⁹  The face of an unsuspecting senator went down in art history under the name Vitellius, and was depicted many times by artists such as Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian and others who kept copies in their studios,³⁶ He seemed to have been easily recognisable to the public of the time by his facial features, and the reference to his life story described in Suetonius was always present. 

While the status of Grimani Vitellius is disputed, numerous imitations that appeared in the course of the 16th century are modern. In the case of the above-mentioned bust from Turin, the museum’s website states that it is a work from the second half of the 17th century. This cannot be true, however, given the drawing of the bust from the years 1567-99. In personal communication with the Census in preparation for the photo commission of the Ciacconius models in Turin, Christiane Vorster remarked that the portrait in Turin was most probably an antique bust that had been reworked into a Vitellius portrait of the Grimani type. This thesis is underlined by details such as the double chin formed by the addition of marble, which was considered so typical of the emperor, as well as the characteristic pointed tip of the chin.

The sculpture was included in the Census as an Antique Monument, using the drawing in the collection of Ciacconius as a source for the identification of the portrait as an ancient Vitellius. Once again, a work considered to be (at least partially) Early Modern can claim a place in the Census as an Antique Monument and, once again, several scholarly assessments of the date of the work co-exist. From an art-historical perspective, we should keep the possibility of differing opinions in the reception of the portrait over the course of time. Rather than deciding if the works should be regarded as antique from today’s perspective or not, our interest lies in the question: what would art connoisseurs, collectors, and artists of the Renaissance have seen if it were their eyes, and not ours, that regarded the work in question?

In 2005 Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel expressed regret that the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance, ‘a colossal and invaluable undertaking’, was:

distorted by a massive historical misperception: it includes only works of art that modern scholarship judges to be antiquites. It excludes everything else that for Renaissance beholders carried the authority of antiquity³⁷ 

Now, the first steps are being taken to correct this misconception.

Bibliography:

• Baas, Phillip, ‘Der einsame Kaiser. Zu einem Porträtkopf des sog. Aulus Vitellius in der Antikensammlung’, Jahrbuch der Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel 2013, Petersberg 2014, pp. 86–91.
• Bava, Anna Maria and Enrica Pagella (eds.), Le meraviglie del mondo. Le collezioni di Carlo Emanuele I di Savoia, Genoa 2017.
• Becker, Marcus, ’Ein Vitellius Grimani in Lauchhammer. Zur Kontextualisierung einer Antikenkopie im Kunstgussmuseum’, Pegasus, Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike 3 (2001), pp. 143–61.
• Bober, Phyllis P., ‘The Census of Antique Works of Art Known to Renaissance Artists’, in Millard Meiss (ed.), Renaissance and Mannerism. Studies in Western Art, vol. 2, XXth International Congress of the History of Art 1961, Princeton 1963, pp. 82–9.
• Caldelli, Maria Letitia and Gian Luca Gregori, ‘Forgeries and Fakes’, in Christer H. Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford 2015, pp. 43–48.
• Christian, Kathleen W.,  Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572, Turnhout, forthcoming.
• Fittschen, Klaus, Die Bildnisgalerie in Herrenhausen bei Hannover. Zur Rezeptions- und Sammlungsgeschichte antiker Porträts, Göttingen 2006.
• Furlotti, Barbara, ’Try it with the Tip of your Knife: Looking out for Fake Antiquities in Sixteenth Century Italy’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 91:1 (2022), pp. 7–21.
• Herlitz, Alexandra and Alexandra Fried, ‘Fakes Matter as a Matter of Fakes’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 91:1, (2022), pp. 1–6.
• Jones, Mark, Fake. The Art of Deception, London 1990.
• Jones, Mark, ’Why Fakes?’, A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage, 1st ed, vol. 1. Routledge 2019, pp. 221–25.
• Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, The Art Bulletin, 87.3 (2005), pp. 403–15.
• Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010.
• Orlandi, Silvia, Maria Letizia Caldelli and Gian Luca Gregori, ’Forgeries and Fakes’, in Christer Bruun und Jonathan Edmonson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford 2014, pp. 42-65.
• Paul, Eberhard, Gefälschte Antike, Leipzig 1981.
• Reißer, U., Physiognomik und Ausdruckstheorie der Renaissance. Der Einfluss charakterologischer Lehren auf die Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1997.
• Anna Maria Riccomini, ’Su una statua di Erote dormiente a Torino. La `fortuna´ dimenticata di un marmo antico’, Rivista di Archeologia, 40 (2016), pp. 85–94.
• Scher, Stephen K., ’Our Insatiable Desire for All Things Antique. Isabella d’Este as Patron and Collector’, in Inge Reist (eds.): When Michelangelo Was Modern. Collecting, Patronage and the Art Market in Italy, 1450-1650. Leiden/Brill 2022.
• Sinn, F.,  ‘Zu den kaiserzeitlichen Reliefs in den Ciacconius-Alben’, in: Christiane Vorster, Georg Satzinger, J. Luckhardt, T. Döring (eds.), Die Antikenalben des Alphonsus Ciacconius in Braunschweig, Rom und Pesaro. Dokumentation und Deutung antiker Skulpturen im 16. Jahrhundert. Tagung in Braunschweig vom 11. bis 13. Oktober 2017, Braunschweig 2018, pp. 214–49.
• Vorster, Christiane, Georg Satzinger, Jochen Luckhardt und Thomas Döring (eds.), Die Antikenalben des Alphonsus Ciacconius in Braunschweig, Rom und Pesaro. Dokumentation und Deutungantiker Skulpturen im 16. Jahrhundert, Tagung in Braunschweig vom 11. bis 13. Oktober 2017, Braunschweig 2018.

1. Furlotti, ‘Try it’, p. 18. [↩]
2. Bober, ‘The Census’, p. 85. [↩]
3. Riccomini, ‘Su Una statua’; Bava and  Pagella, Le meraviglie, p. 229. [↩]
4. Riccomini, ‘Su una statua’, p. 88. [↩] [↩]
5. See Bava and Pagella, Le meraviglie, p. 229 [↩]
6. Christian, Riario, Chapter 6 [↩]
7. Scher, ‘Our Insatiable Desire’ [↩]
8. See: Jones, “Why Fakes?’, p. .225. [↩]
9. Herlitz and Fried. ‘Fakes matter’, p. 3. [↩]
10. Jones, ‘Why Fakes?’, p. 223. [↩]
11. Ibid., p. 13. [↩]
12. Furlotti, ‘Try it’, p.. 18. [↩]
13. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 408. [↩]
14. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 29. [↩]
15. Ibid. p. 408. [↩]
16. Nagel and Wood, ‘Toward a New Model’ [↩]
17. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 282. [↩]
18. Satzinger, p. 74. [↩]
19. Ibid., p. 79. [↩]
20. Transcription by R. Simons, https://arachne.dainst.org/entity/7065105. [↩]
21. Tommaso della Porta, who today is primarily known as a painter and sculptor, owned a private collection of antiquities, which is one of the most frequently illustrated collections in the Ciacconius albums. (See Vorster et al., Die Antikenalben, p. 23. [↩]
22. Transcription by R. Simons, https://arachne.dainst.org/entity/7045948. For the relief, now re-used in a stemma of the Riccardi family at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence, see Sinn, ‘Zu den kaiserzeitlichen Reliefs’, pp. 214–249. [↩]
23. Nagel and Wood, ‘Toward a New Model’, p. 410. [↩]
24. Nagel & Wood, Ibid. [↩]
25. See Reißer, Physiognomik [↩]
26. Ibid. [↩]
27. Vitelli imperatoris effigies ex marmorea statua Romae in aedib(us) Ioa(n)nis Francisci // Garimberti civis Romani //(Transcription by R. Simons, https://arachne.dainst.org/entity/7356087. [↩]
28. See Paul, Gefälschte Antike, p. 54. [↩]
29. Ibid., p. 54. [↩] [↩]
30. Ibid., Cf. Suet. Vit. 13 and 17. [↩]
31. Becker, ‘Ein Vitellius Grimani’, p. 164. [↩]
32. See Fittschen, ‘Die Bildnisgalerie’. [↩]
33. Paul, Gefälschte Antike, p. 55. [↩]
34. Fittschen, Die Bildnisgalerie. [↩]
35. Paul, Gefälschte Antike, p. 53. [↩]
36. See: https://www.themorgan.org/collection/drawings/142601. [↩]
37. Nagel and Wood, ‘Toward a New Model’, p. 467. [↩]

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