The Sidereus Nuncius affair - by Flaminia Gennari Santori
https://www.bibliophilia.blog/laffaire-sidereus-nuncius-di-flaminia-gennari-santori/
In the spring of 2012 the news of a sensational looting arrived in the newspapers: for months the director of the National Library of Girolamini in Naples was systematically appropriating hundreds of volumes stored in the institute. Tomaso Montanari first wrote about Il Fatto Quotidiano describing a scene reminiscent of Curzio Malaparte: Vico, the director's German shepherd, pattered in the central library hall, "with an immense ham bone in his jaws" between five hundred piled up on the floor and Coca Cola cans abandoned on the seventeenth-century counters (Tomaso Montanari reconstructs the story in Le pietre e il popolo, Rome, 2013, pp. 46 - 59). Thanks to the testimony of Maria Rosaria and Piergianni Berardi, two librarians who had witnessed stunned by repeated looting at night, the Carabinieri put the Library under seizure and in May 2012 the Naples Public Prosecutor arrested the director, Marino Massimo De Caro. De Caro confessed the theft of the Girolamini and others made in various Italian libraries, and was sentenced to seven years. At the moment he is awaiting a second trial that sees among the charges also that criminal association.
With a bizarre curriculum, still visible on the website of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Marino Massimo De Caro arrived at the Ministry of Culture with Giancarlo Galan, who had already called him as an expert consultant in energy sources at the Ministry of Agriculture. Once in Cultural Heritage, in May 2011 Galan conferred on De Caro a mysterious task of supervising the Italian book heritage, on the probable suggestion of Marcello Dell'Utri, and, the following month, the direction of the Girolamini. Minister Ornaghi reconfirmed it, although De Caro was already a much-discussed figure in the antiquarian world.
Its vicissitudes in the energy field, seasoned by Russian "oligarchs" and bribes that pass through the banking institute controlled by Denis Verdini, have been told by Claudio Gatti and Ferruccio Sansa in Il Sottobosco (Milan, 2012), in which De Dear, he makes a good impression. As murky as they are, they are nonsense compared to their exploits in the field of the ancient book. As a boy, in fact, De Caro is moved by an immoderate passion for the first editions of Galileo; a passion nourished in equal measure by material interest and narcissistic delirium that makes it an anthropological emblem of the collective tragedy in which the twenty years of Berlusconi has precipitated us.
This passion led him to produce an exceptional forgery: an autograph copy of Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei (1610), the revolutionary treatise that dismantles the scaffolding of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy. The extraordinary aspect of the copy are five hand watercolors of Galileo himself, representing the corrugated surface of the Moon observed by the telescope. The engravings illustrating the Sidereus Nuncius were drawn from these watercolors. Just to please, the copy is ennobled by the signature Galileo, from the library brand of the cardinal Federico Cesi, the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, and a seventeenth-century binding of the highest quality. Nicholas Schmidle told the intricate story in a masterly article published in the New Yorker (December 16, 2013), but in Italy little or nothing is known yet. The history of the false Galileo, in addition to revealing aberrant aspects of the management of our cultural heritage and the dynamics of the antiquarian market, has undermined the practices that for over a century have enshrined the authenticity of collectibles. We talked about this with Nick Wilding, the historian who, starting from Sidereus Nuncius, has discovered and continues to discover false De Caro products.
In 2005, well before the story of the Girolamini, De Caro sold to Richard Lan, a New York merchant, the Sidereus Nuncius "autograph" for half a million dollars, declaring that the volume belonged to a Masonic lodge active in Italy, to Malta and Argentina. A source to say the least imaginative (and also a bit 'left), but according to Nick Wilding was quite plausible in the logic that govern the book market, where "unlike what happens in the art market the origin of object is not considered a decisive aspect; the costume is to trust or not to pose the problem. "Moreover, it was not the first volume that Lan bought from De Caro.
Aware of the impact that the copy would have had on Galilean studies and the history of science in general, Lan commissioned an in-depth analysis of the edition to an international group of specialists. In 2011 Galileo's O (Akademie Verlag) was published, which collected the results of the research coordinated by Horst Bredekamp professor of art history at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin and among the most authoritative exponents of the Bildwissenschaft, the method of interdisciplinary analysis of the image which has had a great impact on the history of art in the last decades. After working for decades on Italian art and visual culture between the Renaissance and the Baroque, Bredekamp recently dedicated himself to the relationship between drawing and scientific and philosophical elaboration, publishing in particular Galilei der Künstler (Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009). After examining the volume from every possible point of view with great care and in absolute good faith, the authors of Galileo's O sanctioned the authenticity and extraordinary importance of what was now known as the Martayan-Lan Sidereus Nuncius, from the name of the antiquarian company that owned it.
Lan told Time Magazine that the copy had a market value of about ten million dollars, a figure that barely a decade ago, when the big new technology entrepreneurs had not yet discovered the manuscripts or the first editions of scientific texts, would have been unthinkable. "There's a love story going on between the so-called dot.com and the great texts of the history of science: it's a collection that represents the affirmation of a direct descent, of a genealogy," says Wilding. "The works of Galileo, or those of Kepler, today have a market that they have never had in the past becoming the ideal object for a forger" like the Rembrandt or the minor painters of the fourteenth century around 1900.
In 2011, while De Caro the Girolamini kidnapped, Wilding works on a review of Galileo's O and begins to realize that something is not coming back. A year later he is able to prove that the volume is entirely false, which has never been in the library of Cardinal Cesi, that the binding is seventeenth-century and "of extraordinary quality" but originally belonged to another volume. He also discovered that the falsification had been obtained relatively simply: the first step was to photograph an original copy with a digital device; the images were then finished in Photoshop, printed as negatives and transferred onto polymeric photo plates that were imprinted on a card that reproduced the ancient mixture with great master. According to Wilding, the paper, which was subjected to every possible examination, could also have been authentic, while the text presented minor imperfections.
The certainty that the copy was false came when Wilding came across an inconsistency in the title page: in the last line of the text appears a sign, a short dash, next to the P of the word Privilege, which does not belong to the typeface, as he sees by observing the other P on the same line. "The sign derives from a visible imperfection in a black and white photograph made in 1964 to make a facsimile copy from a specimen of the Sidereus Nuncius preserved in the Brera Library" explains Wilding. Similar imperfections also appeared in other volumes of Galileian that appeared at the same time on the market and were attributable to De Caro.
In June 2012, when De Caro was already arrested, Wilding published online his refutation of the authenticity of Martayan-Lan Sidereus Nuncius. The scientific community immediately recognizes the copy as false and the authors of Galileo's O have overturned everything they had declared in a volume that will be published in the past (A Galileo Forgery: Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius, edited by H. Bredekamp et al. , De Gruyter, Berlin 2014). According to the publisher's description, the book offers a completely new perspective compared to the "specialist psychology" that analyzes its own mistakes.
It is a paradoxical situation, from which according to Wilding some evidence emerges: first, to realize the false De Caro has had more substantial external supports than what he told Nicholas Schmidle who was able to interview him for the New Yorker; secondly, thanks to technologies that are now accessible, it is possible to falsify almost everything, even a very famous first edition of Galileo. De Caro has been discovered because Sidereus Nuncius is not his only fake: the young man, as he is in his character, wanted to overdo it. Around 2005 various false Sidereus Nuncius appear on the market and at least three false specimens of the operations of the geometric and military compass, a short treatise of Galileo printed in 1606 in only sixty copies. The latter were identified in 2006 by Owen Gingerich, a retired professor of astronomy and history of science at Harvard, and Frank Mowerey, the restorer of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. All volumes can be traced back to De Caro and the Gingerich, Mowerey and Wilding analyzes have shown that they were produced with the same method.
De Caro learns the craft around 2000 by Daniel Pastore, an antique dealer from Buenos Aires involved in some thefts in the national libraries of Madrid and Buenos Aires. But for the leap in quality we must thank the Vatican: somehow, our acquires the trust of Cardinal Jorge María Mejía, head of the Vatican Library and Secret Archive, and in 2003, says Nick Wilding "De Caro exchanges with the library Vaticana some incunabula and manuscripts worth about $ 100,000 with six volumes of a total value of about five million dollars, among which, some legendary copies of works by Galileo, such as those from the Barberini library, or the Compass belonging to Leopoldo Cicognara , "An art historian and bibliophile who lived between seven and eight hundred so important that when he ended up in poverty the Pope bought his library en bloc to preserve it.
"The exchange with the Vatican provides De Caro with the tools that he would later use to falsify other Galilean volumes," continues Wilding, "the Cicognara Compass came from the library of Federico Cesi and had the original mark of his library, a lynx on the title page. De Caro used the Compass to create the false copies that appeared shortly thereafter on the market and the brand to create the one on the front page of the Martayan-Lan Sidereus Nuncius. Not surprisingly, around 2004, books with unconvincing Cesi crests began to appear on the antique market. De Caro also obtained from Vatican a very important copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the paradigmatic example of Renaissance publishing and typography, published in 1499, and one of the first books ever printed in Italy: a copy of Lattanzio's works (the Christian writer of the period Roman artist admired by Poliziano) produced in Rome in 1465. The Vatican librarians managed to avoid a second exchange, but Cardinal Mejia continued to help De Caro favoring his access to the Library of the Seminary of Padua from which he subtracted some volumes. A few years later, through the intercession of De Caro, the Vatican hosted an exhibition of Fabergé's egg collection by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian businessman for whom he worked. "Covering different roles - counterfeit, intermediary, advisor, thief - De Caro animates a 'illegal economy that lives on objects of desire of the powerful: the Faberge eggs for the Russian oligarchs, or the first editions of Galileo for the magnates of dot.com. "After the exchange with the Vatican, continues Wilding, De Caro subtracts a copy of the Sidereus Nuncius to the National Library of Naples that substitutes with a forgery and later, when it is already employed to the ministry of the Cultural Assets, it picks up from the Library of Montecassino a copy of the Compasso that substitutes with a false one. The primary function of the fakes was to replace the authentic copies stolen and their final destination was not the market, except perhaps in the case of the Siderius Nuncius sold to Lan. De Caro was discovered because he produced several specimens that have similar characteristics and did not resist putting them on the market. If he had only sold one copy, we probably would never have discovered it. Certainly it is the first forgery we know of that has produced entire volumes, and this is an absolute novelty with which the antiquarian market has to deal. "
The market of the ancient book is a relatively small world and the raids of De Dear if they were not known, they were undoubtedly suspected. Part of the books taken away from the Girolamini, along with many others, were intended for a public sale in Monaco, scheduled for May 2012 at the auction house Zisska & Shauer, which had already paid De Caro 900,000 euros. In just a few weeks, thanks to the interception of De Caro's telephone, the Neapolitan magistracy has recovered about 2000 volumes taken from public libraries. Herbert Shauer, owner of the Munich auction house, was arrested and extradited to Italy.
According to Nick Wilding, De Caro's ties with some of the most respected Italian and foreign merchants are rooted and constant, since he obtained the volumes of the Vatican Library until spring 2012, as shown by the interceptions collected in the days before the arrest. "De Caro is certainly driven by a burning desire to pillory the academic world, identifies with the first Brechtian version of Galileo, that of the free thinker who questions authority, and wants to present as a Borgesian character, complex , contradictory, even ironic, as he did in the interview with the 'New Yorker'. But this is a representation; the ultimate end is money. "
What leaves you astonished is that it is the looting of the Italian library heritage that the previous falsifications seem to be functional to the book market system or at least to part of it. The next trial will have to ascertain any participations and responsibilities but, concludes Wilding, "looting is the final modality of privatization of cultural heritage. Also in this case the fakes create a virtual Italian culture, made up of "prototypes" never existed and historical collections that expand according to the opportunity. You take a book, by definition, a multiple object, and it turns into a single object, ennobled by an ideal story. It does not seem to me that this affair is really shaking the antiquarian market, but certainly in a context like the current one, where ancient scientific texts have entered fully into the economy of prestigious objects, it is necessary to ask questions and finally begin to consider the origin of the objects is a crucial component from a legal, intellectual and ethical point of view. "
Marino Massimo De Caro is one of the many sinister masks on the national stage; but the fact that we were able to rash with impunity on our history, covered by ministers and undersecretaries of different sides, while the dog Vico was raging among our books, is a point of no return that we hope will give us a lesson.
