There is something irresistible about forgers, cocking a snook as they do at their target establishments — in this case the formidable intellectual and historical talents of Baroque (hardly Renaissance as the title claims) Rome, a circle which included the towering figure of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. What makes this case even more piquant is that the forger was a 19-year-old Tuscan nobleman, Curzio Inghirami, and the forged manuscripts posing as important Etruscan relics were wrapped in his 13-year-old sister’s hair.
The discovery in November 1634 of these odd capsules known as scarith, scaritti, allegedly took place on a fishing expedition by the Inghiramis on the river below their villa of Scornello, perched on a hill overlooking the ancient Etruscan city of Volterra. They purported to contain, written on linen rag-paper, the prophecies of the Augur Prospero of Fiesole, which included, among other things, his prediction of the coming of the Messiah. They were greeted with extreme excitement in Florence, then the seat of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as proof of the superior (and anterior) civilisation of their Etruscan ancestors to that of the upstart Romans who had finally conquered them. The scarith, Inghirami and his family claimed, ‘begin with Noah, founder of Volterra, and contain a continuous series over 1,800 years of 55 Tuscan Kings, the foundation of the 12 cities [of the Etruscan League]….’ Within three years of the ‘discovery’ of the scarith, Curzio published a handsome book of the texts they contained, entitled Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta.
This bold publication brought the matter to the attention of the international scholars based in Rome round the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII, who had recently condemned for heresy and presumption another far more famous Tuscan, Galileo. The documents were revealed as obvious forgeries: quite apart from the fact that it was well known that the Etruscans wrote on linen cloth and that paper was unknown to them, many of the predictions were clearly portentous gibberish and Curzio’s Latin was dodgy to say the least. Scholars attacked on stylistic and linguistic grounds, proving them to be derived from a mad 15th-century antiquarian forger, Annius of Viterbo. The brilliant Leone Allacci denounced ‘Prosper’ as ‘this fogmaker from Fiesole’ and subtly pointed the finger at Curzio Inghirami as the author: ‘There’s a puerile placement in these texts … The gods blast you, greenhorn …’ Allacci had effectively demolished Curzio Inghirami, but the battle between Rome and Florence went on, with Pope Urban determined to assert the cultural supremacy of Rome over the provincial gentlemen’s academies of Tuscany. Allacci proved that the handwriting of Curzio Inghirami and ‘Prospero of Fiesole’ was virtually identical. Moreover, Curzio had failed to recognise, as Allacci pointed out, that the two genuine Etruscan inscriptions discovered in Volterra (of all places) were written from right to left, while ‘Prospero’s’ ran from left to right. It was, however, only in 1700, 45 years after Curzio’s death that the final, inescapable proof came: the paper on which the texts were written bore the watermark of the state paper factory in Colle di Val d’Elsa.
Why did Curzio Inghirami do it? Partly, Rowland thinks, in order to escape from the drudgery of the law for which he was destined, partly also from a genuine passion for things Etruscan, feelings of patriotism for his native Volterra and, above all, his family villa of Scornello, which he was convinced was an Etruscan site. He did it principally because he enjoyed it: as a huge and elaborate joke in the tradition of the Tuscan beffa.
This is a fascinating, erudite book. Ingrid Rowland, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the American Academy at Rome, is thoroughly at home with the intellectual complexities and personalities of 16th- and 17th-century Italy. She writes well, bringing the extraordinary story of the scarith of Scornello so to life that you can visualise the two teenagers laughing over their wonderful hoax on that November afternoon in Tuscany.