The history of faking is nearly as old as the history of art, and for as long as there have been documents, there have been forgeries. "This is not a lie, it is indeed the truth," runs an inscription of the earliest forgery we know, a Babylonian cuneiform inscription from the 2nd millennium B.C. pretending to be one from the 3rd millennium. "He who will damage this document, let Enki fill up his canals with slime."
In the thousands of years since, there have been fake epics and poems, fake royal seals and family trees, fake historical relics (from chastity belts to spurs of warriors killed on the field of Agincourt), fake newspapers, propaganda photos, films and books. Some of these, like the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by a 19th century Russian anti-Semite, have had appalling political consequences. Others, like the work of the fictional bard Ossian and the skull of Piltdown man, have had deep cultural ones. Others still, like the phony mermaids that turned up in the cabinets of Renaissance collectors and the fraudulent photographs of fairies that deceived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, may not have mattered greatly but retain a certain fascination as souvenirs of human credulity.
In art, of course, the field widens immensely -- as does the spectrum of motives and responses. An honest copy becomes a fake when the context of desire is switched. There are Egyptian statues from the 7th century B.C. that deliberately copy the archaic style of Old Kingdom figures done nearly two millenniums before. Chinese craftsmen in the Sung dynasty made ritual bronze vessels almost indistinguishable from those of the Shang period, 2,100 years earlier. Roman sculptors in the 2nd century A.D. made versions of 5th century B.C. Greek prototypes, and from then on, there would be an immense industry in the copying, overrestoration and outright forgery of everything antique -- marbles, bronzes, pots, cameo gems, goldwork.
There is no kind of artwork that has not been forged, from Cycladic idols to Watteaus, from medieval manuscripts to rococo porcelain elephants, from Michelangelo drawings to paintings by Constable, Picasso or (a great favorite) Renoir. It used to be said that Camille Corot painted 800 pictures in his lifetime, of which 4,000 ended up in American collections.
This is a subject that makes museums nervous, and perhaps it is not so strange that no museum show in recent memory has focused on forgery and its ramifications. Hence the interest of "Fake? The Art of Deception," a sprawling and overcrowded array of more than 600 objects, on view at the British Museum. "We are all emotionally involved with fakes; nobody wishes to be associated with them," the museum's director, Sir David Wilson, sagaciously remarks in the catalog. "Fortunately, most of the worst errors are our own, the result of nearly 2 1/2 centuries of collecting." The reluctance to fess up may account for the absence from this show of some of the real lulus of American public collections, such as the fake Etruscan warriors that until some 30 years ago were star exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.