StartseiteGruppenForumMehrZeitgeist
Web-Site durchsuchen
Diese Seite verwendet Cookies für unsere Dienste, zur Verbesserung unserer Leistungen, für Analytik und (falls Sie nicht eingeloggt sind) für Werbung. Indem Sie LibraryThing nutzen, erklären Sie dass Sie unsere Nutzungsbedingungen und Datenschutzrichtlinie gelesen und verstanden haben. Die Nutzung unserer Webseite und Dienste unterliegt diesen Richtlinien und Geschäftsbedingungen.

Ergebnisse von Google Books

Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.

The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of…
Lädt ...

The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (2004. Auflage)

von Ingrid D. Rowland (Autor)

MitgliederRezensionenBeliebtheitDurchschnittliche BewertungDiskussionen
802332,845 (3.75)Keine
A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family's Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome. As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity's sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn't know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again--this time over Etruscan history. An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio's far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio's creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.… (mehr)
Mitglied:varielle
Titel:The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery
Autoren:Ingrid D. Rowland (Autor)
Info:University Of Chicago Press (2004), Edition: 1, 192 pages
Sammlungen:Deine Bibliothek
Bewertung:
Tags:Forgery

Werk-Informationen

The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery von Ingrid D. Rowland

Lädt ...

Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest.

Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.

I love tales of the bizarre, especially bizarre history or archaeology - so I surprised by how bored I was with this book. I found myself skimming great numbers of pages of errata or background information, and I just kept hoping the author would get to the meat of the story.

Fans of detailed descriptions of 17th century Italian society are probably cursing my ancestry now (that’s ok, I curse them all the time). Just too much academic historical arcana for me - it seemed like this story could have been told with a long-ish magazine article.
( )
  memccauley6 | May 3, 2016 |
I do love a good hoax. And Ingrid Rowland's The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (University of Chicago Press, 2004) is the story of a pretty good hoax. In 1634, 19-year old Curzio Inghirami, his younger sister and a servant, wandering the grounds of their rural Tuscan estate near the old city of Volterra, "stumbled upon" a strange ball of pitch, fabric and hair which when broken revealed several pieces of linen rag paper on which were written certain 'prophecies' penned by one Prospero of Fiesole (Prosperus Fesulanus). More of these strange capsules, which became known as scarith (based on one of the inscriptions), were soon found near the same location, and they purported to be a series of writings dating from the late Etruscan period, around the mid-60s B.C.

The Inghirami clan rallied around young Curzio, claiming and then defending the authenticity of the scarith and their inscriptions - which, if accurate, raised their region to a certain historical prominence. Curzio published a compilation of the contents of the scarith in a lavish book, Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta (Florence, 1636), complete with a false 1637 Frankfurt imprint. The book, richly made and illustrated with numerous woodcuts, copper engravings, and folding charts, was a triumph of book production ... but its flashy contents failed to convince the critics.

Rowland inexplicably fails to mention one of the first criticisms, by Meric Casaubon in his 1638 book A treatise of use and custome, but she does examine the strong critiques leveled at Inghirami's work by Leone Allacci and others, in which it was pointed out that Curzio's philological and forensic skills weren't quite up to par: his "Etruscan" inscriptions read left to right, rather than the correct right to left, and his inscriptions were written on rag paper, rather than the linen cloth known to have been used in actual Etruscan writings. Curzio also has his writer complain about running out of paper at one point, when the inscription was found balled up within several layers of extra paper ... which of course was setting aside the larger issue of the fact that the inscriptions were later found to be printed on paper bearing the watermark of the state paper factory. It's a good thing Curzio didn't show off his scarith very often.

The criticisms of Inghirami's work by Allacci and various others, as well as defenses written by Curzio himself and a few of his friends, are well outlined, and Rowland does well at placing Curzio's work in the context of Italian regional political and religious jockeying of the seventeenth century, with the struggle over Galilean scientific theory never far from the fore and the various regions families competing for influence. The book is well illustrated, although the small format has resulted in the compression of Inghirami's detailed engravings to an unfortunate degree. Almost fifty pages of footnotes with translations and much additional content, plus a delightfully-detailed bibliography, are welcome additions indeed.

There are some really interesting aspects to this case which bear some similarities to a few other literary forgeries: the "important discovery" by a young man who later published his findings in a luxurious book reminded me of William Henry Ireland's Miscellaneous papers and legal instruments under the hand and seal of William Shakspeare (1796); the regional patriotism brings to mind the Ossian forgeries of William Macpherson, and Rowland herself draws parallels with Thomas Chatterton. The "d'oh moment" with the watermarks is similar to the Vrain-Denis Lucas forgeries, although those (for reasons entirely unclear) held up far longer than they should have.

A must-read for the forgery buff. Anybody up for translating and reprinting the canon of original works? That I'd like to see. In the meantime, if you have £2,500, you can have your own copy of Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta, via Arthur Freeman Rare Books (their description of the book, I have to say, is an absolute delight).

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/05/book-review-scarith-of-scornello.html ( )
2 abstimmen JBD1 | May 17, 2009 |
keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Du musst dich einloggen, um "Wissenswertes" zu bearbeiten.
Weitere Hilfe gibt es auf der "Wissenswertes"-Hilfe-Seite.
Gebräuchlichster Titel
Originaltitel
Alternative Titel
Ursprüngliches Erscheinungsdatum
Figuren/Charaktere
Wichtige Schauplätze
Wichtige Ereignisse
Zugehörige Filme
Epigraph (Motto/Zitat)
Widmung
Erste Worte
Zitate
Letzte Worte
Hinweis zur Identitätsklärung
Verlagslektoren
Werbezitate von
Originalsprache
Anerkannter DDC/MDS
Anerkannter LCC

Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen.

Wikipedia auf Englisch (1)

A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family's Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome. As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity's sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn't know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again--this time over Etruscan history. An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio's far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio's creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.

Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden.

Buchbeschreibung
Zusammenfassung in Haiku-Form

Aktuelle Diskussionen

Keine

Beliebte Umschlagbilder

Gespeicherte Links

Bewertung

Durchschnitt: (3.75)
0.5
1
1.5
2 1
2.5
3 1
3.5 1
4 3
4.5 1
5 1

Bist das du?

Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor.

 

Über uns | Kontakt/Impressum | LibraryThing.com | Datenschutz/Nutzungsbedingungen | Hilfe/FAQs | Blog | LT-Shop | APIs | TinyCat | Nachlassbibliotheken | Vorab-Rezensenten | Wissenswertes | 203,225,713 Bücher! | Menüleiste: Immer sichtbar