Forgers and Forgeries

Every fake masterpiece tells two stories: the one it pretends to be, and the truth it conceals. W.G. Constable, longtime curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, pulls back the curtain on centuries of artistic deception in this absorbing study of why people forge art and how they get away with it. From Renaissance sculptors copying antiquities to modern painters mimicking the masters, Constable traces the history of forgery through its most notorious practitioners. What motivates a skilled artist to pass off another's work as their own? How do they replicate the specific hand of another era, another sensibility? And once a forgery enters the collection, how do experts ferret it out through provenance, technique, and increasingly, science? More than a catalog of scams, this book asks the unsettling question that haunts every museum and collector: what actually makes art authentic? Is it the hand that made it, or something less tangible? For art lovers, collectors, and anyone who has ever wondered what's real, Constable offers a fascinating journey through the looking glass.