"Claudius Caesar" with Mary Beard | The Past Is Present
2 Video Views·Sep 16, 2024
How can we tell what’s fake and what’s real? What’s the difference between a forgery and a replica? Which was Giovanni da Cavino trying to make when he created his medals? Mary Beard explores the motives behind Cavino’s creations.#Artexhibitions
I'm wanting to take a really close look at what most of us would think was a Roman coin,
and here we've got it under the digital microscope, and you can see one side of it here,
a woman's profile head and her name round the outside, Antonia Augusta, and that's the name
of the Emperor Claudius's mother. We're in the middle of the first century CE, and we need to
take a look at the other side. I need to ask a conservator here to do this for me. Thank you,
that's great, and here's the other side, and here we've got the Emperor Claudius himself. He's
dressed up in his priestly kit here, and this funny spoon is what he uses to ladle libations
with, and it's got his names round the outside, Tiberius, Claudius, Caesar, etc, and it says
SC, which means this is minted with the authority of the Senate, the S, and it does look
all the world like a Roman coin. We can find Roman coins almost identical, but this isn't a
Roman coin. We know that this was made in the 16th century by a craftsman from Padua called
Giovanni da Covino, and he made loads of this and other types, which we know for a fact are not
Roman. The weight standard of them isn't Roman, it doesn't match the Roman weight standard,
the metal doesn't match the metal of Roman coins, and to be honest, the condition of them is
suspiciously good for a coin that's that old. So what is Giovanni da Covino up to in making
these coins? I think it's quite easy to leap to the conclusion that what he's doing is faking,
but I think fakes are a bit more of a complicated category than they sometimes seem.
I mean, we know, for example, we buy, look, a fake handbag, and that's a fake, but when we go to a
museum store and we buy a replica, we're buying a replica, not a fraudulent fake. The point about
fakes is that they have to have an intent to deceive about them. There's no reason to think
that Giovanni had an intent to deceive. The 16th century was a time when people were really keen
on Roman coins. In fact, they saw the Roman world much more through the lens of a coin
than through sculpture, for example, and I think it's very likely that he was making these as
tributes to Roman craftsmanship of coins, possibly for people who've got gaps in their
coin collection, wanted to fill it with at least a version of what they were looking for.
But why I'm interested in these is because they complicate the category of the fake or the
inauthentic. I mean, we tend to think that something is either fake or it's real, and actually
there's a whole spectrum in between, and the fake is only a fake if it is made or sold with intention
to deceive you. We have no reason to suppose that Giovanni was attempting to deceive.
And anyway, they are very beautiful.