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The Scarith of Scornello: 17th Century Hoax / Forgery

dandare29

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This review was in the NEW YORK TIMES, book review section, 16 Jan 2005. You might be able to read an excerpt from the book if you go to www.nytimes.com (You have to register to get in, but its free.)

Note: I'm not sure what they mean by "hairball."
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'The Scarith of Scornello': False Prophet
By GARRY WILLS

THE SCARITH OF SCORNELLO
A Tale of Renaissance Forgery.
By Ingrid D. Rowland.
Illustrated. 230 pp. University of Chicago Press. $22.50.

It probably began with a Tuscan beffa (prank). Leaving their villa, Scornello, to fish in the nearby Cecina river, the Inghirami children -- Curzio, 19, and Lucrezia, 13 -- took along a servant to be a witness to their ''discovery.'' They pretended to find a buried artifact they had planted beforehand. It was a coated hairball with a paper inside, on which a message written in Latin purported to be 17 centuries old. The text, by a certain ''Prospero of Fiesole,'' prophesied the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ, and addressed whoever might find the message in warning words. When the siblings took it home that November afternoon of 1634, their grandmother urged them to throw it away as a cursed thing.

But they knew this was just one sample of the hairballs they had planted around the site of their discovery. The number would eventually reach 209. The texts serially unearthed, some with fake Etruscan oracles, identified themselves as ''scarith'' (''prophecies'' -- Curzio's made-up noun is both singular and plural, though it would get Italianized as a scaritto and the scaritti). Curzio, the composer of the messages, had a sly humor, as he would reveal later in comedies written for the stage. His sister helped fabricate the hairballs: ''No wonder Curzio and Lucrezia Inghirami greeted the discovery of the first scarith by doubling over with laughter. What fun they must have had creating them,'' Ingrid D. Rowland writes in ''The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery.''

They were probably amazed at the gullibility of adults who came to believe in them, including important and learned adults. The prank got out of hand, and Curzio would spend his remaining 21 years defending the authenticity of his artifacts. His fabrications made him a local hero, a knight of St. Stephen, a historian of his city, a reformer of its laws and a consultant to the learned body of Bollandist hagiographers. Philosophers and linguists solemnly debated the scarith, some of them pugilists over Galileo's theories. The unfolding controversy revealed aspects of the regional, familial, rhetorical, ecclesiastical and political cultures of the time. Rowland, Andrew W. Mellon professor at the American Academy in Rome, cleverly uses Curzio's story to probe them all, drawing a parallel between the handling of Curzio's and Galileo's claims in the courts of Medicean Florence and of papal Rome.

Crude though Curzio's scarith were, they showed a knowledge of history and language that seemed beyond the skills of a teenager. So the search for a forger began as a wild-goose chase after the person who had put this young nobleman up to such a hoax. This line of inquiry offended the family honor of the Inghirami, who had important connections in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In fact, the grand duke himself, who was only 24, took pride in his young countryman's discovery. Scornello, near Volterra, was a place where genuine Etruscan finds were commonplace, and the locale boasted of its ancient lineage. Beyond that, there was a widespread belief, still, that pagans had prophesied Christian events, as well as a local belief that Noah had traveled through Tuscany. An attack on the scarith became an attack on regional honor.

There was no mastermind behind Curzio's inventions, but there was a model for them. A century and a half earlier, Giovanni Nanni, a protege of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, a polymath Dominican friar who ended up in an insane asylum, had taken an Etruscan pseudonym, Annius, to promote a grandly imagined history for his city of Viterbo. ''His intertwining of archaeological artifacts, inscriptions, manuscripts, local topography and well-known ancient sources not only proved difficult to untangle,'' Rowland writes. ''It also set the standard for all subsequent antiquarian writing, sincere as well as counterfeit.'' Curzio, who may have begun his jape as a satire on Annius, became in time his imitator, doing for Volterra what Annius had done for Viterbo.

As time went one, he had little choice in the matter. Relatives and friends took up his cause so fervently that he could not let them down by revealing the truth. Scholars who attacked the scarith were vilified. One (Vincenzo Noghera) was threatened with a lawsuit that would reveal his unsavory past as a Portuguese spy. Another (Paganino Gaudenzio) had his chair at a Tuscan university imperiled. A third (Leone Allacci) was mocked for his crude polemical style.

But Tuscan loyalty did not have an endless reach. Curzio's defenders hoped for sympathy from a Florentine (Medici) pope, Urban VIII. Galileo had made the same miscalculation. In the Rome of long knives, a bright and bitter Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, teamed up with other critics to make a savage attack under the pseudonym Durkhundurk (''Through-and-Through'') on every aspect of the scarith. The demolition was thorough. ''Prospero'' wrote on paper; the Etruscans wrote on linen. Prospero wrote from left to right; the Etruscans wrote in the other direction. Prospero wrote in the hand of Curzio himself. Finally (though this was not known till later), some of Prospero's papers had a ''modern'' watermark.

Inchofer, who had examined and denounced Curzio's fellow Tuscan, Galileo, won as clear a victory against Curzio himself. The odd thing is that Inchofer had first made his name defending a fraudulent document, a letter of the Virgin Mary written to the city of Messina. This loose-cannon Jesuit went on, eventually, to attack his own order, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment ''in a remote Jesuit house where, like many an inconvenient Jesuit in those troubled times, he was quietly assassinated in 1649.''

Curzio's fraud had only a brief time of fame; but the men who attacked it were almost as vulnerable, on several grounds, as the fake documents themselves. Rowland, in this dazzling piece of scholarship, gives Curzio the last laugh. His was a fertile fakery: ''The rapid increase in knowledge about the Etruscans during the next hundred years was largely sparked by the discovery of the scarith.''
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Garry Wills, adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author, most recently, of ''St. Augustine's Conversion.''
 
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