Bust of Girolamo Benivieni
Giovanni Bastianini (1830-1868) · 1864
An old man in a plain cap and gown bows his head, his lined face and sunken cheeks rendered with a realism that seems to belong to the Florence of Savonarola. He is supposed to be Girolamo Benivieni, poet and friend of the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who died in 1542. The modelling of the skin, the loose folds beneath the chin and the thin lips are extraordinarily convincing, and that was the point: the bust was made in 1864 by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Bastianini and sold as a genuine work of the fifteenth century.
Bastianini sold the terracotta to the Florentine dealer Freppa, and it passed into the Nolivos collection, where it was attributed to Lorenzo di Credi. At the Paris sale of 1866 the Count de Nieuwerkerke, superintendent of fine arts under Napoleon the Third, bought it and resold it at the same price to the Louvre. Then Bastianini, angered that the dealer had earned so much more than he had, announced publicly that he was the author. The scandal was one of the great art-world stories of the century, and the museum has kept the bust ever since as a masterpiece of a different kind.
Did You Know? The forger himself blew the whistle, publishing letters to prove that he, not a Renaissance master, had made the bust.
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