But, as we have said, where the fancy of the faker really ran riot was in those small bronzes of various origin and still more various purpose, nowadays called plaquettes. These bronzes were sometimes cast from the form of an old cameo, at others they imitated or aped a like origin, and whether they may have been used as buttons, pommels of the hilts of swords, or simply been demanded by collectors, they were for the most part imitations of the antique. In these works the metamorphoses of the original are at times so numerous and so absurd as to puzzle the modern collector and cause him to speculate on the acumen of some of the connoisseurs of the past. With some of these small bronzes the metamorphosis is not in the form but in the inscription that sometimes accompanies the plaquette, but on other occasions the subject and the figures are considerably altered. As an example of the former we may quote the supposed portrait of Julius Cæsar of the Courajod collection. In this case the plaquette bears the inscription “Ivllivs C. . Pp . Pm.”, which has caused the wrong naming of this bas-relief, for an identical plaquette, formerly in the collection of Mr. Bardini of Florence, seems to indicate that it must be a question of Cicero. The second inscription runs thus, “M. Tvllivs .C.P.P.P.M.”
As for the second method, the alteration of the form and subject of a plaquette, the fancy displayed by the makers borders upon the grotesque.
To begin with a mild form of metamorphosis, let us follow the subject of Apollo and Marsyas in its transformation from the original cameo that was in the collection of Lorenzo il Magnifico and, according to Muntz, is now in the Naples Museum, together with many others from the same collection. In this cameo the god is on the right, playing the lyre held in his left hand, Marsyas to the left has his hands tied behind him, between the two figures kneels Olympus (a pupil of Marsyas) interceding for his doomed master.
The supposed original in the Naples Museum bears but one inscription, “Lavr Med.,” evidently standing for Lorenzo Medici, but Ghiberti tells us that on this cornelian “around the said figures were antique letters spelling the name of Nero.” There is nothing strange in this, nor in the presupposition that the cameo had been Nero’s private seal, as one knows he was fond of playing the lyre, but what casts some doubt on the authenticity of the Naples cornelian stone is the fact that the Berlin Museum possesses a bronze plaquette, evidently a reproduction from some antique cameo, with the inscription to which Ghiberti alludes, “Nero-Avgvstvs-Germanicvs-P-M-Tr-P-Imp-Pp-.” The cornelian stone kept in the Naples Museum has no inscription and for this reason is supposed by some to be a reproduction from the original ordered by Lorenzo Medici. The plaquette of the Berlin collection is thought to be cast from the original Greek cornelian stone, though there are other reproductions in various museums, one for instance in the Louvre very similar to the one of Berlin, another in the collection of Courajod, with the inscription, “Prudentia. Puritas. Tertiom. Qvod. Ignoro.” Mr. Courajod also owned two more copies of this subject, one similar to the one of the Louvre with the addition of a border, the other of larger dimensions with the figure resting on a ground in the form of a crescent. A bas-relief of this subject, used as an ornament of the pommel of a sword hilt and very similar to the other plaquettes was in the Davillier collection. N. Schlifer and Giovanni Boldu (1457) treated the favourite subject with a certain plagiarism of the Greek model. In Boldu’s bas-relief Apollo is in the usual attitude, but the other figure has disappeared.
There are many other plaquettes, with small variations, in private collections. There is also a plaquette of this subject in the Dreyfus collection, in which Apollo has become a woman and Marsyas is playing the flute.
Evidently the subject must not only have been popular among collectors but must have caught the fancy of artists as the composition of Apollo and Marsyas is reproduced in a bas-relief of a fine door formerly in Cremona and now in the Louvre Museum. The one at Naples is repeated almost identically in a cornelian of the Cabinet des Medailles, in a portrait of a young girl, attributed to Botticelli, in the Staedel Museum of Frankfurt; on the frontispiece of a work executed for Mathias Corvinus; on a frontispiece of the Sforziade, that rare work kept in the library of the Riccardi in Florence; on a majolica dish of the fifteenth century, now in the Correr Museum in Venice. There is a plagiarism of this subject in a work by Raphael in the Vatican.
The following examples, however, are perhaps more typical of an intentional transformation, a somewhat reversed case and an exception to the rule in this sort of faking, namely a Christian subject turned into a pagan one for the benefit of the fifteenth-century amateurs. There still exist in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, two bas-reliefs representing two incidents in the life of the saint who has given the church its name, one when he is arrested and put to prison, the other when he is chained in his cell and liberated by the angels. The two bas-reliefs, wrongly attributed to Pollaiolo, were ordered from some Roman artist in the year 1477 by Sixtus IV, then a simple cardinal. Of each of these bas-reliefs there is a modified reproduction, one in the Louvre and the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the modifications of both are such as to make people believe them to be pagan subjects and antique work. In the reproduction kept in the Louvre the transformation of the subject without much alteration of the work is so evident that we can see how easily old collectors were taken in by these curious pieces of truquage. Of a more naive, but no less efficient character is the transformation inflicted upon the bas-relief of Kensington. Here in order to transform the miraculous liberation of Saint Peter into the freeing of a Roman senator it has sufficed to clip the angel’s wings, both inside the prison—the work being divided into two different moments of the action—and where the saints usher the apostle into the street.
Photo:
Alinari