Authenticating art, and I include manuscripts in this, is
not a straightforward and simple process. You can’t just look at a painting and
say, “Yea, that’s a real Van Gogh. Go ahead, it’s perfectly safe to pay a few
million for it. Open your wallet, all is well.”
There is the analysis of brushstrokes, the chemical analysis
of the paints used, paintings are X-rayed and carefully examined under a variety
of microscopes and using advanced analytical equipment. And, in recent years, authentication
specialists have added another tool to their authentication repertoire. Though according
to this New
York Times article on carbon dating materials used after the atomic bomb
testing and the bombs dropped in Japan during WWII to determine if the artwork
was created before the additional nuclear material in the environment or after,
it might be a fleeting tool.
It’s rarely just one person who determines the authenticity
of a painting. There is also the provenance to consider. Just because the person
selling you the painting tells you they got it legally from, for example, an
enthusiastic yard sale purchaser who had it hanging in the dining room for forty
years, and took it to an antique roadshow type of event where the dealer
purchased it for a fair price, doesn’t mean it was theirs to sell. The most
obvious example of art that wasn’t a dealer’s to sell are the Nazi looted paintings.
This is why it’s equally important to dive deep into the
history of a piece and in essence track its life story. Where did it originate,
who had it next, etc. The more information about a piece’s history can be
verified through documentation, receipts, journal entries, etc., the more
valuable the piece becomes. Assuming of course that paper trail is authentic.
There are examples of well-crafted forgeries with stellar provenances, including
perfectly forged receipts. But it just takes one forgery in that chain to be
pegged as false to unravel the scheme.
But what about books and ancient manuscripts? How can you
tell if the piece is authentic and what makes it authentic? In the case of the
Archimedes Palimpsest – read about it in the book The
Archimedes Codex - the actual prayer book it was found in was authentic in
and of itself. However, the pages of the prayer book were created from reused parchment.
And the original text of most of the pages, not all, in the prayer book contained
notes and mathematical formulas that were from Archimedes teachings. The prayer
book had therefore been made from much older scholarly material.
It was a very common practice in ancient times to reuse parchment.
It wasn’t cheap to get brand new parchment and if you could afford it, did you
get the superior calf’s parchment or settle for lesser quality sheep parchment?
Most of the educational texts centuries ago were written on the
lesser quality sheep’s parchment and were commonly reused for new texts. There
are different parchments that have survived with recipes on it for how best to
remove old ink from parchment and how to prepare it to reuse it. From soaking
it in either a highly acidic solution or highly alkaline solution, to adding
the burnt or ground skin of a hare, which doesn’t seem like it would have an effect.
Turns out everyone had their own recipe, some going back to Egypt, around AD 300.
After soaking it was recommended you stretch the parchment on a frame and put
something heavy on it. This means there would be small holes around the edges
of the paper, which can give an authenticator or conservator a clue that the
parchment had been reused and the text on it was most likely not the original.
After all that soaking and stretching and flattening, the
user was advised to scrape the parchment to remove roughness and any surface ink
that might remain. To do that it was recommended one use either pumice stone or
chalk. Each of these leave unique microscopic traces in the form of scratches or
whitening of the parchment. An authenticator, as well as a conservator, can see
those and identify them under a microscope or can even take tiny samples to analyze
the composition of the material used in that last process of clearing the
parchment of old ink.
There are not many examples of whole manuscripts being
forged, though individual pages, especially illuminated ones (those with
beautiful painted designs and illustrations on them) do come up as forgeries
from time to time. More on that next time.
