< previous page page_197 next page >

Page 197
In the Middle Ages, some opponents of the Donation of Constantine tried to reconstruct the facts and reject the text as apocryphal because it contradicted what they knew about the past. In a letter to Frederick Barbarossa in 1152, Wezel, a follower of Arnold of Brescia, argued that in the Donation was a mendacium because it contradicted other witnesses of the period, which showed that Constantine had been baptized under other circumstances and at a different time. The criticism became more rigorous in the early Humanistic era: for example, in the Liber dialogorum hierarchie subcelestis of 1388 and in the De concordantia Catholica by Nicholas of Cusa, the author tries to establish historical truth by careful evaluation of all the sources.
Lorenzo Valla displayed more indisputable historical proofs: for instance, he proved that the Donation speaks of Constantinople as a patriarchate when, at the supposed time of composition, Constantinople did not exist under that name and was not yet a patriarchate.
Recent study of an alleged exchange of correspondence between Churchill and Mussolini has shown that, despite the genuineness of the paper used, the correspondence must be rejected and considered a forgery because it contains evident factual contradictions. One letter is dated from a house in which Churchill had not at that time lived in for years; another deals with events which occurred after the date of the letter.
7. Conclusions
It thus seems that our modern culture has outlined ''satisfactory" criteria for proving authenticity and for falsifying false identifications. All the aforementioned criteria, however, seem useful only when a Judge is faced with "imperfect" forgeries. Is there a "perfect forgery" (see Goodman 1968) which defies any given philological criterion? Or are there cases in which no external proofs are available while the internal ones are highly arguable?
Let us imagine the following:
In 1921, Picasso asserts that he has painted a portrait of Honorio Bustos Domeq. Fernando Pessoa writes that he has seen the portrait and praises it as the greatest masterpiece ever produced by Picasso. Many critics look for the portrait but Picasso says that it has been stolen.
In 1945, Salvador Dali announces that he has rediscovered this portrait in Perpignan. Picasso formally recognizes the portrait as his original

 
< previous page page_197 next page >