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status symbol and the supply of genuine pieces was exhausted, Roman craftsmen quickly filled the void. Today, experts believe that 90 percent of “original” Greek statuary was made by Romans. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries clandestine workshops operating across Europe produced paintings in the style of such masters as Michelangelo, Titian, and Ribera, and to this day these forgeries continue to surface. Some may never be properly identified. Forgery was so widespread that some of the masters became forgers themselves. The young Michelangelo painted a work in the style of his master Domenico Ghirlandaio and passed it off as an original after doctoring the panel with smoke to make it look older. He subsequently sculpted a sleeping cupid and sold it off as an antiquity. In the nineteenthcentury, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot knowingly signed copies made by others in his name. It is a long-standing French joke that of the twenty-five hundred paintings Corot produced in his lifetime, eight thousand can be found in America.27

Searle had seen enough fakes to know that it wasn’t always the technical faux pas that gave forgers away. Just as often they left behind an unmistakable cultural footprint. A Madonna of the Veil purportedly by the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli was “discovered” in the 1920s and sold without provenance for $25,000. A celebrated find at the time, the piece was declared fake more than fifteen years later, after an art historian noticed that the Madonna looked more like a 1920s film star than a Renaissance beauty. Experts who examined the “Silent-Movie Madonna” found, among other inconsistencies, that the figure’s robe had been painted with a blue pigment not developed until the eighteenth century.28 At a more prosaic level, holes on the surface that looked like they had been caused by an infestation of woodworms had in fact been drilled in.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin asserted that fakes lack the special aura an original artwork invariably carries, that the work’s essence, its personal contact with a particular time and space, can never be replicated. Those who believe in the eventual triumph of good over evil posit that most fakes are eventually exposed. Others are more skeptical. History supports the second group.

The art market is a potential minefield. With so many fakes being produced, even the most experienced dealer can make a mistake. Art historian Bernard Berenson, who consulted for major U.S. museums and collectors and established the market for “old masters,” once warned that the best of experts could be fooled. “Let him not imagine that a practical acquaintance with last year’s forgeries will prevent him falling victim to this year’s crop,” he wrote. Berenson cautioned dealers and experts not to be swayed by provenance, which he said could be forged more easily than the work itself. His words, predating Drewe’s scam by some eighty years, now seem prophetic: “[There is nothing] to prevent a picture being painted or a marble carved to correspond to a description in a perfectly authentic document. Nothing but a fine sense of quality and a practiced judgment can avail against the forger’s skill.”29

It is impossible to calculate the exact number of forgeries circulating at any given time, but the guardians of high art have estimated that anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the works on the market are either fakes or genuinely old works that have been doctored to fit a more valuable style or artist. Thomas Hoving said that in his eighteen years at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he examined some fifty thousand works, “forty percent were either phonies or so hypocritically restored or misattributed that they were just the same as forgeries.” Italy’s Art Carabinieri, whose job it is to police the country’s cultural heritage, claimed to have seized more than sixty thousand fakes during the 1990s. And yet, despite a growing awareness of the prevalence of forgeries and an array of sophisticated technology using infrared and ultraviolet