Art Forgeries

Until I read a book review on the topic, I didn’t realize that forging art wasn’t always a crime! Unlike, say, forging drugs and currency, which have always been a crime. That makes sense. After all, as the Economist puts it:

“If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.”

That’s rational thinking. But the Middle Ages were hardly the age of reason, were they? And yet the Middle Ages did not consider art forgery a crime. Why?

Firstly, paintings and sculptures were mostly meant for religious purposes, which meant they were almost always commissioned by the Church. And since the Church had no intention of selling them, who would believe your copy was the real thing anyway?

Besides, many of those works of art were not valued for their look or the painter/sculptor. Instead:

“What mattered about objects such as these was not so much whether they were originals or copies, whether they were old or modern, as whether they worked miracles.”

Conversely, that meant even a copy was valuable if it was felt to perform miracles!

Further, ancient work was valued more than new ones. So much so that even when Michelangelo, he of the Sistine Chapel fame, made forgeries, they were considered valuable because of the object he had copied! You’d think they’d be valued because the great man had made them, but no!

The book review says art forgeries began to matter well after that period when views such as the one below started to catch on:

“One is the belief that works of art of all periods have a certain intrinsic value and that their historical and stylistic character should be respected, including, to some degree at least, the inevitable changes wrought by time.”

To me, that sounds like gibberish. And yet this is the thinking of the modern age, the supposedly rational age! Next, art works started getting sold and bought, which is when the original began to matter even more.

And once you put a price, then ego came into the equation as per the Economist:

“Expensive pictures are primarily what economists call positional goods—things that are valuable largely because other people can’t have them. The painting on the wall, or the sculpture in the garden, is intended to say as much about its owner’s bank balance as about his taste.”

I finally get why art forgery evolved from a non-crime to a crime.