Anatomia di un duplice falso di scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento: la Cecilia Gonzaga «OPVS DONATELLI» in Slovacchia
Francesco Caglioti
Since 1975, the Spiš Museum in Levoča, eastern Slovakia, has preserved a marble half-bust of a young woman, inscribed at its base «CECILIAE GONZAGAE • OPVS DONATELLI». First brought to scholarly attention in 2021 as a potential autograph by Donatello, the work is here demonstrated to be instead a modern fabrication of modest execution, produced after 1894 through recourse to a plaster cast supplied by the Florentine manufactory of Oronzio Lelli. This cast, in turn, was derived from the so-called Belle Florentine in the Louvre. The latter, a product of Desiderio da Settignano’s workshop, had long been regarded as the likeness of a fifteenth-century Italian gentlewoman (identified, until 1888, as Isotta degli Atti, and, from 1894 onwards by the Lelli firm, as Cecilia Gonzaga). Yet conservation undertaken at the Louvre some two decades ago revealed its true nature as a wooden reliquary of Saint Constance the Martyr, companion of Saint Ursula.
The Levoča bust accordingly fulfils all the conditions required to be classified as a deliberate forgery, rather than as a more commonplace nineteenth-century reproduction of an early Renaissance original. From this perspective, it proves useful to disentangle and reconstruct the figurative and epigraphic sources upon which its author relied, for such an exercise illuminates anew the strategies and mechanisms underpinning the manufacture of modern forgeries within the field of Italian Renaissance sculpture.