Sunday 6 November 2022

The Source of the Composition of a Fake Drawing

I am helping to catalogue the collection of leaves and fragments owned by the late Marvin Colker, which will be sold at Christie's in about a month's time. The collection contains lots of interest, and I have at least one more blogpost in preparation about items from it. Today I provide a very brief one, concerning the drawing above.

The drawing occupies the centre of a bank page, with ample margins around it:

It is on a verso, with the end of the preceding text (Hildebert of Le Mans, Sermons) on the recto:

The script is rather variable, and perhaps by more than one scribe of, I suppose, the middle, or third quarter of the 12th century:

But what about the date of the drawing on the verso?

If I show an enhanced version, the drawing becomes clearer:

I am not cataloguing this particular leaf, so I have not given it any focused consideration. To my mind it is an appealing drawing in Romanesque style, except that there is something very odd about the hands, and once one's suspicions are raised, it increasingly looks "wrong". Colker knew that it was not contemporary with the manuscript; in his handlist he described it as a "modern copy of an Ottonian painting".

By chance I found the source of the image today. Looking through Jacques Rosenthal, Catalogue 27: Manuscrits à miniatures et livres illustrés = Illuminated Manuscripts and Illustrated Books = Bilderhandschriften und illustrirte Bücher (Munich [June 1901]), I found this image:
It appears in a copy of St Augustine's Letters, no. 7 in the Rosenthal catalogue:

We can now see why the hands are awkwardly placed in the Colker copy: the copyist has removed the scroll held by St Augustine, with his name on it:

The copyist also seems to have omitted the figure's right fore-arm (on our left).

With the vast numbers of images of medieval manuscripts that are now easily available to everyone, it is easy for forget how recent a phenomenon this is. If someone (whether a forger or an amateur hobbyist) wanted to try their hand at making a "medieval" drawing there were comparatively few easily available sources from which to copy before the early 20th century. Something like an illustrated bookseller's catalogue would be ideal.

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting, and great catch.

    I took the original image, and created it as a "layer" of 30% opacity over the supposed copy. It is strikingly close, when adjusted for scale. Only one portion, on the upper left, misses.

    This appears to be a light table copy, or possibly, a copy by Camera Lucida. If you are familiar with those optical devices, they allow the precise tracing of any original, to any scale. But one of the "tells" of a CL is that they can reproduce proportions unequally along one axis, if, say for instance, the original is propped up at an angle, or if the relationship between the original and the copy shifts during the process.

    I've suspected a CL has been used in several past forgeries, when they exhibit concerns similar to yours, in this case.

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