Genuine forgeries
By Thomas Curtis | Tuesday, 6 January 1998
Forgery is a spurious thing, not genuine, not being what it pretends to be, and not coming from the pretended source. One of the classic tales in numismatics is how a former Director of the British Museum, Sir George Hill, saw an attractive Greek lady and his eyes were riveted on a splendid large Athenian decadrachm of the finest style of the mid-fifth century BC which she was wearing set in a piece of jewellery. Appropriate negotiations in 1920 secured it for the British Museum but, sadly, the piece subsequently turned out to be an imitation by the notorious Athenian forger Constantine Christodoulos.
When the Greek authorities raided his workshop in 1914 they found about 1000 dies for making ancient Greek coins. This evidence, due to World War One intervening, was not published until 1922 - when Sir George and the Museum became aware of their mistake. Christodoulos forgeries still circulate, knowingly and unknowingly, to trap the unwary.
Forgeries by skilful forgers, such as the productions of Christodoulos, are, in the beginning dangerous deceits created to fool collectors, and might in one sense appear not to qualify as 'genuine forgeries'. However, products of forgers from ea rlier days, Camelio, Cesati and Cavino in the sixteenth century, and Becker, Cigoi and Emery in the nineteenth, in time can bring with them a respectability of sorts, even giving an added dimension of authenticity to something which begins life as a forgery.
In terms of ancient forgeries, we can turn to the story in Herodotus (mid-fifth century BC) of how Polycrates, ruler of Samos, bought off the besieging Spartans by making coins in lead and gilding them. Herodotus himself doubts the story, not believing that the Spartans could be so gullible, but the true answer may lie in Polycrates, in dire straits, issuing a lead token coinage. Examples can still be identified today. Athenian token coinage is well attested in the literature, not least in the cheerful obscenity of political satire in plays such as Aristophanes' 'The Frogs', written about 405 BC, which speaks of 'the purses of the Athenian shoppers are full of shoddy silver-plated coppers...'. Again, the result of Athens being cut off from her silver mines at Laurium so silver-plated bronze coinage was issued.
In Roman Britain, after the Claudian invasion of AD 43, the issues of copper asses with standing Minerva reverses were insufficient to meet demands and large numbers of imitations were manufactured, apparently in Spain and Africa, and especially in Britain. Whether these imitations should be classed as illegal forgeries, or as officially condoned coinage of necessity to be accepted in circulation, is a matter of debate. Recently a hoard of silver-plated forgeries of Claudian denarii was found in Essex and, since they were considered to be forgeries did not fall under the provisions of Treasure Trove. When an export licence was applied for for some of them, it was refused on the grounds that they had not been properly studied. Indeed, at the time, the find spot had not been properly declared by the finder. Forgeries they may be, but they were an extremely important piece of numismatic evidence for the period.
Another group of forged denarii was retrieved from the Thames foreshore. This consisted of 76 denarii in the name of Septimius Severus, silver plated onto a base core. Of these, 55 were from the same pair of dies, they were not cast as is known with other Severan forgeries. There were several cross links in the dies used and, from the various combinations represented, it seems that here was a serious attempt to make plated coins in large quantities. How they came to be in the Thames leads to speculation whether they were thrown away as worthless imitations, dropped as 'hot property' by the forgers, or simply lost by someone crossing the river.
Interest in ancient coins arose in the Renaissance (Petrarch is generally credited as the first known collector of ancient coins), and this led to certain specimens being 'provided'. Two spectacular gold pieces are known from an inventory of the collection of Jean, duc de Berry, in 1402. One showed Constantine on horseback and a Christian iconographic reverse of the old and new Churches, the other represented Heraclius and a reverse scene of his return to Jerusalem with the True Cross. Once dismissed a forgeries, they are now recognised as perhaps the earliest examples of French medallic art but, at the time, purporting to be ancient originals and with an eager collector anxious to acquire them, the duc de Berry must have paid an exorbitant sum for them; the British Museum has versions in silver and bronze.
Revived interest in the histories of ancient Greece and Rome in the courts of Renaissance Europe encouraged clever engravers to create ancient works of art to supply the demand, and medallic coins were ripe for such treatment.
Alessandro Cesati was a past master at producing such pieces, and is noted for his imaginative versions of ancient medals. These included Priam as King of Troy and incorporating a fine, imaginative view of the fabled city. Others of Cesati's medals included Dido Queen of Carthage and also Alexander the Great. Possibly one of Cesati's medals is in the painting of Jean Varin showing an antique medal to Louis XIV of France. Apparently of silver, the medal bears a helmeted male portrait identified as the great Athenian general Alkibiades. No example of this piece has come to light yet, but it probably will.
One of the earliest books that treats of the problems of recognising genuinely ancient coins from (then) modern products was written by Enea Vico in 1555.
The products of Giovanni di Cavino, a native of Padua, who died in 1570, has given the epithet 'Paduan' to a whole range of forgeries, many of which have no connection with their eponymous city. Cavino's forgeries of first and second century Roman sestertii were extremely convincing. Fortunately, his dies have survived and, bequeathed to the Abbey of St Genevieve, Paris, in 1670, are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
In a sense, once the background to forgeries becomes known, all forgeries acquire a sort of authenticity, acceptable as long as they are seen as more or less modern copies. If nothing else, they do need to be kept in a cabinet for reference purposes, even if not as a collection in their own right. This can be seen particularly in the case of Carl Wilhelm Becker (1773-1830), one of the most talented and scholarly of hand-engravers of false coins. His career in forgery is said to have begun when he sought redress unsuccessfully for a forgery he had bought. He aged his products by packing them in a box of iron filings attached to the underside of his carriage. Fortunately, his dies were offered to, and bought by, the Imperial Cabinet in Vienna, and there is a useful publication of his oeuvre, although new pieces do still surface from time to time.
Another eminent master forger of the early nineteenth century was Edward Emery who was responsible for hand-struck pieces from hand-engraved dies. His coins show a close acquaintance with the coinage of the period which they purport to be. Emery produced coins of Anglo-Saxon kings for whom no coinage existed which were believed to be genuine for forty years, until condemned in the Numismatic Chronicle in 1905. There is also a forgery of a coin of Richard I purporting to have been struck at the mint of Ascalon in the Crusades, and a testoon of Mary Queen of Scots and the French Dauphin Francis (later Francis II), that was based on a genuine gold ducat. Sometimes Emery's coins, like his shilling of Philip of Spain and Mary dated 1554, and his Irish groat of 1553, were really too good to be true.
An Italian forger, Luigi Cigoi (1811-75), produced some particularly convincing forgeries from ancient through medieval to seventeenth century Venetian pieces. He concocted varieties and they also had a convincing fine fake patination.
As a last consideration of 'genuine forgeries' there is the work of two longshore men, 'mudlarks', William Smith and Charles Eaton. To supply a demand that outran the few genuine pieces they were finding in their work at Shadwell Docks and selling, they concocted medieval forgeries, many of a very bizarre nature and with even stranger dates on them. Controversy raged concerning the genuineness of these items, and even reached the courts. These objects are now well known as 'Billies and Charlies', collectable in their own right, and they have even reached the stage where modern forgeries of them are being produced!
