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By Sarah Pickard; MLS Candidate, Pratt Institute
 * The Art of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries: Art's biggest mysteries**

Art copies, fakes and forgeries date back for centuries between Egyptian and European artists. Around the 1400s, Western art began to make a comeback with its intense focus on the church and Christianity. Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo Buonarrti and Leonardo da Vinci began producing magnificent artwork. Their creativity and talent encouraged the true start of the art trade. Like families such as the Medici of Florence, Italian families began to show interest in collecting and displaying artwork in the palaces. They encouraged the public to also view art by allowing them to see their collections in the Pitti Palace, for example.

Because of the growing interest in buying and collecting art, forgeries became popular. Italian masters had been using the practice of copying as an educational tool for decades, but it was not until this growth in interest that those copies became artwork in themselves. As we will see in the collection presented in this catalog, masters even began to copy from other masters, leaving us still questioning today, who did it first? Or even, who created it at all? By the 1700s, other European royalty began collecting art. This further increased the demand for art, and encouraged forgers to copy more often. Soon, two famous auction houses sprung up in England: Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both of which still auction off art in New York and London to this day. Art museums began to sprout up in European cities. By the 1800s, museums were a well-established part of urban life. With the popularity of artwork growing substantially from 1400 to 1800, copies and forgeries were no longer an “innocent” problem (Craddock, 2005).

In the 1400s, when copies were first being used to teach students the master’s techniques, it was extremely difficult to find surface differences between the original and the fakes. These innocent practices soon became a profitable career. Forgers began to open their own studios in Europe and they learned how to make paintings look like identical copies, while still paying less attention to techniques. Because there was little art education for collectors they could easily sell artwork under the name of artists such as Titian and Donatello without anyone questioning the authenticity of the artwork. In this way, copies were more authentic than forgeries, making them hard to tell the difference, but to an untrained eye they would look identical (Kuiper, 1973).

As the call for authentication specialists grew, many techniques began to be invented to differentiate between original and fake pieces of art. The first techniques to authenticate paintings began with forensic investigation. Scientists would scrape paint off of painting and use chemicals to date the paint. These were the first steps to identifying the authenticity of the artwork to the claimed artist. But today, scientific techniques have become more sophisticated. We now have a better understanding of the palettes and techniques of artists. The ways of examining paintings have become smaller and less abrasive. Techniques such as Raman microscopy (RM) and non-invasive versions of standard techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) can help scientists examine artwork without taking away paint or using harsh chemicals (Craddock, p. 56). Furthermore, portable versions of these studies are now available, making it easier for scientists to go to museums to examine artwork. The invention and usage of digital imaging has greatly helped the examination process as well. With digital imaging scientists can now study the topography of artwork to show consistencies in artists’ techniques. Also, multispectral imaging can be used to allow a more complete study of colors used by the artist (Craddock, 2009).

Because of the growth in our education and understanding in the world of art, copies, fakes and forgeries are becoming less common. However, we still have decades of art to examine in the world’s museums, libraries and personal collections. In this catalog you will see many examples of copies and different stories as to how we deal with each individual case. As you will come to learn, not all copies are fakes, although they are still not the originals (Townsend, 2009).


 * Sources:**

Bell, S. (2009). //Fakes and forgeries//. New York: Facts on File, Inc.

Craddock, P. (2009). //Scientific investigation of copies, fakes and forgeries//. Slovenia: Elsevier LTD.

Kuiper, L. (1973). //The restoration of paintings//. Dishoeck.

Townsend, J. (2006). //Fakes and forgeries//. Chicago, IL.:Raintree.