Real or Fake #19
Tuesday, 1 April 2025. Newsletter 19.
Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.
For those with long memories, this forger has featured in these pages once before. Do you recognise their hand? Can you distinguish between their forgery and the original drawing? Extra marks for naming both the original artist and the forger.
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The original, of course, is the upper image.
Upper Image: Raphael, Death of Meleager, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photo © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Lower Image: The Calligraphic Forger, Death of Meleager, formerly in the Habich collection, Kassel
Although the true identity of this forger remains unknown, they have been dubbed the ‘Calligraphic Forger’ because of their recognisable tendency to copy Raphael’s compositions and to embellish his more sparse and functional use of lines. The artist was identified in 1913 by the German art historian, Oskar Fischel, through a group of homogeneously handled drawings in the style of Raphael and his pupil Timoteo Viti. Fischel gave the forger the notname of the 'Calligraphic Forger’ in a 1927 article in The Burlington Magazine, and speculated that the artist may be an Englishman working in the early 18th century, although more popular hypotheses argue that the artist is a 17th century Italian.
These two drawings depicting the Death of Adonis provide a particularly interesting case study. The forgery once duped the renowned connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, father of the ‘Morellian method’ of attribution. Morelli claimed that his friend Habich had purchased the 'original' at an auction in Germany. Fifty years later Fischel showed Habich’s drawing was, in fact, the product of a forgery.
For further reading, see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ‘Raphael's Heliodorus Vault and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling: An Old Controversy and a New Drawing’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 132, No. 1044 (Mar., 1990), pp. 198-199; Oskar Fishchel: 'A Forger of Raphael Drawings', The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 51, No. 292 (Jul., 1927), pp. 26-31.
