IT IS not every day that one is able to speak to Botticelli’s Virgin Mary. Holding a chubby infant Jesus in her delicate, long-fingered hands, she gazes with wan loveliness from Madonna of the Veil, which belongs to the Courtauld Institute, in London. Another remarkably similar “Botticelli”, Madonna and Child, is in a private collection in Siena.
The woman in the paintings is not, however, a 15th-century beauty, but Clementina Massi Giovanelli, 74, from Siena.
The painter was not Sandro Botticelli, but her uncle, Umberto Giunti, who died in 1970.
The Courtauld, together with other world-famous galleries, has not only admitted that it was fooled, but also has paid tribute to the forger’s genius by contributing to an unprecedented exhibition of more than 100 “Renaissance fakes”.
At the former medieval hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where the show opened yesterday, Anna Carli, the curator, said that Giunti and his mentor, the master forger Icilio Federico Joni, had been “among the leading artists of the 20th century . . . It is time their merits were acknowledged.”
Advertisement
Gianni Mazzoni, an art history lecturer at Siena University, said that it was the first time that the pastiches, which fooled the world’s leading art experts, had been displayed together as masterpieces in their own right.
Signora Giovanelli told The Times that she had posed for her uncle in 1940, when she was 10. “I had no idea my uncle was forging Renaissance paintings to sell on the art market,” she said.
“I didn’t even realise he was using me as a model for the Madonna. I just knew he painted beautiful things.” She said that she was chosen “because I had blue eyes and long blonde hair, the Botticelli ideal”.
Ernst Vegelin, the chief curator at the Courtauld, said that the Renaissance fakes now had a financial value, “though I wouldn’t like to put a figure on them. What is clear is that they do have artistic merit.”
Dr Vegelin said that the Courtauld’s Botticelli Madonna was bought by Viscount Lee of Fareham in 1930 from a Milanese lawyer and art dealer, and formed part of a bequest to the Institute by Lord Lee on his death in 1947.
Advertisement
Doubts had first arisen when Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, suggested that the Virgin’s face had “something of the silent cinema star” about it. Pigment analysis, X-ray analysis and chemical tests confirmed his suspicions.
He said that both Giunti and Joni (who died in 1946) had been extremely clever, “even painting foliage brown rather than green to make allowance for discoloration over time”. Their forgeries were let down, however, by the use of modern colours such as Prussian blue instead of the lapis or azurite used in Renaissance times.
Signor Mazzoni said that the forgers had scoured Tuscan farmhouses for old wooden panels to use as backing, leaving them out in the sun covered in earth and urine to acquire the right patina of age. They also touched up genuine old paintings that had deteriorated.
Experts taken in by the fakes included Frederick Mason Perkins and Bernard Berenson. John Pope Hennessy was said to have been reduced to tears by a sculpture supposedly by Donatello but in fact by a forger named Alceo Dossena, who also specialised in “Greek and Etruscan” art.
“At one stage an entire ring of top forgers was turning out industrial numbers of high-quality Old Master paintings in Siena, with the complicity of art experts and dealers, who palmed them off on the most important museums in the world,” Signor Mazzoni said.
Advertisement
The exhibition includes forged Duccios, Donatellos, Botticellis and Simone Martinis from private collections and galleries such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Dublin, the National Museum of Warsaw and the Cleveland Museum.
Vincio Guastatori, a retired wood carver, said that local craftsmen had been in on the scams. “We were extremely poor in those days. It was considered a kind of social revenge to fool the rich foreigners, as well as a lot of fun,” he said.