The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (review)

Scarith were little capsules of mud and hair, so named because the word appeared on a document found inside one. Their "discoverer," nineteen year-old Curzio Inghirami, claimed that they were of Etruscan origin and had been left buried at his family's villa, Scornello, outside Volterra, where he began to find them in 1634. They contained writings, some in Etruscan and others in Latin, on linen rag paper in script imitative of Etruscan inscriptions, all purportedly the prophecies and accounts of Prospero of Fiesole from the era of the Catiline wars.

Inghirami entrusted these finds to the learned academy of the Sepolti. Subsequently they were exhibited at the university in Pisa and for the grand duke himself, Ferdinando de' Medici, who became interested in a discovery that involved an important family and purported to present a venerable and distinct Tuscan heritage. Eventually, thanks to such interest, Inghirami was able to publish the scarith texts in 1636 in a handsome and elaborate edition.

Broadcasting of the discovery, however, met with immediate doubtful responses. One line of criticism was simply that the Etruscans had not known paper but had written on bolts of linen cloth (no one noticed until 1700 that one sheet in fact bore the watermark of the ducal paper factory). The book only raised further problems. Urban VIII, himself Tuscan, the same pope who only a few years earlier had engineered the condemnation of Galileo, took an interest in them. Their authenticity now became a political issue between Rome and Tuscany. Others generally made much of the paper as historically out of place. Leone Allaci drily noted that the sequential recovery of the texts followed the narrative devised within them too closely for coincidence.

Inghirami found defenders, and he continued to advocate the authenticity of the texts, publishing a response in 1645. What Rowland mainly covers are the scholarly debates, fulsomely analyzed in terms of personalities and institutionalized interests. She employs a wide-ranging intellectual and literary historical approach. Despite the dust jacket's label—an "outlandish prank"—Rowland treats it as a serious attempt to deceive that also became a topic of interest and a diversion among delegates to the meetings and councils culminating in the Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years' War. Rowland has no doubts from the handwriting that Inghirami authored the forgeries. She accounts for his actions by his desire "to become a historian rather than, as his parents hoped, a lawyer" (111). Discovery of the scarith allowed him to remain at Scornello, to play the part of Volterra's historian. Rowland maintains that his unpublished Annals of Tuscany rests on a foundation of similarly falsified papers, an invented past. Comparing him to another notorious forger, Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), she concludes that for both, "forgery was an aggressive act, a way for a young man of restless intelligence to take quiet revenge on a stifling social system, especially on its scholarly elite from which they were so definitely excluded" (116).

Inghirami's forgery ran in the vein of Annius of Viterbo (d. 1502). What he added to the heritage of making up an Etruscan past was supplying "archival" support. But he also crafted his presentation of them, the Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta, as "a monumental parody" (129). The problem was that his beffa (a characteristically Tuscan form of sadistic practical joke found in the work of Boccaccio, among others) charged beyond his control, dragging him into ducal politics, Reformation-era sectarian squabbling, and regional rivalries. Inghirami was never able to disclose his role and enjoy the "joke." Perhaps he enjoyed a posthumous laugh when the scarith were stolen in 1985 by thieves who apparently thought they were genuine.