Giulio Romano (c. 1499–1546)

Trois Crayons Newsletter, September 2024

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.

© The Trustees of the British Museum

© The Trustees of the British Museum

As noted in the opening remarks to this section, copying drawings has long formed part of an artist’s education. Whilst a ‘forgery’ is created with the intent to deceive, a copy is often created with innocent, perhaps educational, intent. Over the course of an Old Master copy’s life however, the intent of the drawing is susceptible to reinterpretation, innocent or otherwise. Collectors as early as Giorgio Vasari have mistaken good quality copies for autograph drawings, and the practice of making autograph replicas has added further confusion to the mix. Similarly complex is the practice of later artists retouching and reworking earlier drawings, querying notions of fakery and originality.

This month we have two drawings from the British Museum, London, where not all is as it might seem. But which example is autograph, and which is the copy? Or is the story more complex than that?

• Answer

  The original, of course, is the upper image. The drawing is by Giulio Romano (c. 1499-1546). The lower image is a copy by an anonymous artist, reworked in the 17th century by Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640) or Erasmus Quellinus II (1607–1678).

  Upper image: Giulio Romano, Perseus disarming and the origin of coral, London, British Museum

  Lower image: Peter Paul Rubens or Erasmus Quellinus II, Perseus disarming and the origin of coral, London, British Museum

  Although the lower image might appear more highly finished at first glance, on closer inspection the figurative outlines in pen and ink are rather pedestrian. The drawing is an early copy of Giulio Romano’s original, but it has been transformed in appearance by the vigorous and extensive additions made with the brush, which have been attributed to Rubens on stylistic and contextual grounds. Rubens was a dealer, diplomat and collector, who owned a large number of Italian drawings by the artists he admired, many of which he reworked in this manner. Clearly, the authorship of such a drawing can cause confusion; when it entered the British Museum in 1851, it was thought to be by Giulio Romano. The arrival of the Giulio Romano’s original drawing in 1895 revealed it to be a reworked copy.

  More recently, Jeremy Wood has argued that the brushwork does not have the liveliness of Rubens and instead attributes it to Erasmus Quellinus II.

  See, M. Jones, Fake? The Art of Deception, 1990, London, pp. 42-43.