Leopoldo Franciolini (1844–1920) was an Italian antique dealer who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is remembered as a fraudster who sold faked and altered historical musical instruments. To this day his work is a barrier to the scholarly study of instruments of the past.
Career
Little is known about Franciolini's life. According to census records he was born 1 March 1844, was married in 1879, and had six children of whom one died before reaching adulthood.Ripin p. xii The census listed his occupation as organist as well as antiquary. It is possible that he founded his workshop in 1879, a date listed on his catalogs. The workshop was at various locations in Florence; during part of its existence his business was housed in more than one location.
Franciolini repeatedly sold fake instruments or instruments that were modified in his workshop to make them more appealing to naïve buyers. For instance, he added various forms of decoration, or even entire extra keyboards to harpsichords. He also attached dates to instruments to make them seem older and gave them false signatures of builders. His modifications damaged the musical value of the instruments and especially their scholarly value, making them less useful in service of modern builders, who rely on historical instruments for their design.Kottick (2003:405)
As Ripin notes, it will not suffice for modern scholars or buyers simply to ignore all instruments that were once in Franciolini's possession, because a great number of valuable authentic instruments passed through his shop as well. These were sometimes modified to look more like the fraudulent instruments, thus giving the latter more credibility.Ripin, p. ix
The character of the fraudulent instruments Franciolini's modifications of old instruments are often crude, involving, for instance, naive forms of decorative art, as well as misspellings of builder's names and errors in Latin mottos.Of the latter Ripin writes (p. x) "The countless errors in his inscriptions reveal Franciolini not merely never to have studied Latin, but also to have been unable to copy even the simplest Latin phrase correctly." Kottick points out one harpsichord in which the bridge for the added, short-scale four-foot strings is not only crude but even larger than the main bridge, an absurdity in normal harpsichord construction.Kottick (2003:404) At one point early in his career, Franciolini was so ignorant as to produce a keyboard in which the sharps all fell in groups of three rather than the familiar alternating twos and threes.Ripin, p. x
A specialization of Franciolini was adding extra manuals (i.e. keyboards) to old harpsichords. For instance, Franciolini concocted a total of five three-manual harpsichords,Ripin, p. 15. All of these are discussed at various locations in this article; see below. They reside in museums in Munich, Nuremberg, Edinburgh, Ann Arbor, and Vermillion. substantially outnumbering the one three-manual harpsichord known to be historically authentic.For the latter, see Hieronymus Albrecht Hass. The two-manual harpsichord was rare in Italy, and Kottick suggests that for essentially any museum instrument described as an Italian two-manual, it is likely that the second manual comes from Franciolini's workshop.Kottick (2003:403)
Clientele
Franciolini worked at a time when many of the great musical instrument collections (stored in museums today) were being built up through purchase by individual wealthy collectors. There was little published scholarship available to protect such buyers from falling victim to his frauds, and thus the collections passed on later to the museums were rife with them.Kottick (2003:404-405)
Different collectors did more or less well at detecting Franciolini's forgeries. For instance, the early music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch, himself a builder, frequented Franciolini's shop, and easily spotted the frauds happening there.For the reminiscences of Dolmetsch and his wife Mabel concerning Franciolini, see Ripin (1974:ix-x). On the other hand, the American collector Frederick Stearns snapped up Franciolini items with such indiscriminate enthusiasm that a century later he was castigated by the scholars who preside over his collection in Ann Arbor today; i.e. the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments. Describing one instrument, they write:
In this case, we have an Alto Clarinet in F. ... It is a composite instrument with four sections: two are leather-covered maple, ... the barrel appears to have been purloined from a bass clarinet ... the bell from an oboe. The mouthpiece appears to be re-purposed from a bass clarinet. ... The simultaneous crudeness and creativity demonstrated in [Franciolini's] catalogue is greatly entertaining. More troubling, however, is the shadow cast upon the flawed judgment of Frederick Stearns in his last years of collecting.
It is possible, according to Kottick, that some of Franciolini's customers didn't really care about fraud, since their interest was in early instruments as vivid decorative objects, not as scholarly artifacts. This view is also taken by the modern luthier/dealer Sinier de Ridder, who suggests moreover that Franciolini "was not the only one to offer to a rich clientele musical objects intended for decoration."Source: de Ridder's website
His arrest and prosecution Franciolini prospered in his fraudulent business for many years. In 1909, however, he committed a fraud that led to his arrest. The facts are not entirely clear from the record, but Ripin offers a plausible conjecture.Ripin's account appears in Ripin (1974:182-183).
According to Ripin, the source of Franciolini's legal trouble was his dealings with another sharp operator. A Count PasseriniFull name Giuseppe Passerini Cerretesi; Ripin p. 195 bought a large group of instruments, including fraudulent ones, from Franciolini, and resold them at a higher price to Wilhelm Heyer, an outstanding German collector in Cologne.Heyer's instruments today form part of the important collection of the Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig. The resale took place through an intermediary, a Florentine bookseller known to Heyer (Ripin p. 197). Passerini added his own deception: he concealed the fact that he had purchased them from Franciolini, and claimed instead that the instruments had been found in a palazzo in Siena.
Heyer quickly spotted the fraudulent character of the collection. He was an astute collector, and the task of detecting Passerini's deception was not even especially difficult: some of the instruments retained labels from Franciolini's shop or were already listed in a Franciolini catalog.Ripin, p. 199 On ascertaining the deception Heyer returned the collection to Count Passerini, who sued Franciolini as well as filing a complaint with the state prosecutor.Ripin, p. 195 Brauchli writes "it is highly improbable that Franciolini, well aware of Heyer's reputation, would have tried himself to deceive Heyer so boldly."Source for this paragraph: Brauchi (1998:296–297); Brauchli's assessment echoes Ripin p. 182.
Franciolini's trial in 1910 attracted considerable attention; it was reported in La Nazione that "a large audience composed of antiquaries, art connoisseurs, artists, etc." attended it.The two relevant articles from La nazione are reprinted with English translation in Ripin (1974:192-195). A court of three judges found the prosecution's evidence fully convincing and the defense's evidence fully unconvincing; and in their verdict they described some of the more vivid instances of forgery (see above) with relish.The full report of the court is given in Ripin (1974:181-191).
A certain virginal, for example, ... was made from piano keys joined together in pairs and filed down and encased in such a way that they could not be able to accomplish the purpose for which they had been intended; a clavicytherium attributed to Sixtus V was nothing but a housing into which the parts of some instrument had been introduced, together with pieces of new wood hidden by a patina intended to simulate age;This is evidently the instrument shown in the image at the start of this article. The coat of arms displayed at the top of the instrument is that of Pope Sixtus V, who is mentioned as a possible former owner in Franciolini's catalog description (Ripin, p. 67). Franciolini's own sales photograph of the instrument is printed on p. 99 of Ripin, and Ripin's commentary on p. 155. a small organ catalogued as being from the Empire period had pasted inside it a list of modern tunes, among which were Bellini's Norma and Sonnambula, a chitarrone said to be inlaid with ivory (according to the catalog) was instead mere celluloid; a cello attributed to Andrea Guarnieri no less and another to Della Corna of Brescia were instead no more than unskilled and patent forgeries.Ripin p. 189
Franciolini was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison. This was commuted to a fine of 1000 lire.Concerning the value of the lira at the time: Franciolini's fifth catalog lists ordinary single-manual harpsichords at 200 to 500 lire, and one of his spectacular three-manual creations at 7000 lire. The lot he sold to Passerini was priced at about 12,500 lire. See
The Franciolini business in later years The punishment did not deter Franciolini from further frauds; he continued operating his instrument-forgery business in the remaining years of his life. Heyer may have attempted to alert other collectors to Franciolini's activities; an anonymous article appeared in the German-language organological journal Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau reporting the Passerini episode from Heyer's own point of view,Anonymous (1910) "Der Instrumentfälscher Franciolini vor Gericht," Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau Vol. 30, no. 19 (1 April), p. 715. ["The instrument forger Franciolini on trial", in Journal of instrument construction]. The article is reprinted, with English translation, in Ripin (1974). and according to Ripin this did help prevent some collectors from being taken in. But outside German-speaking countries, there were still plenty of customers who didn't know about Franciolini's conviction, so it was still possible to some degree for him to continue business as usual.Ripin, p. xiv. To this might be added customers who knew that Franciolini's instruments were fakes but didn't care; see remarks on "Clientele" above. Franciolini instruments continue to be sold even today; see "Dealers and auction houses" below.
A particularly brazen sale appears to have taken place in 1911. As the Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau reported,See Ripin, pp. 200-201. Franciolini's son Luigi traveled to London with his brother-in-law, bringing a set of instruments purporting to be from the estate of the senior Franciolini, whom they claimed to have died. Among their instruments was a fake three-manual harpsichord derived from a 1627 single-manual by Stefano Bolcioni. It appears that the Franciolinis had redecorated it, so that it would no longer match the sales photograph they had circulated earlier. The instrument probably was successfully sold at the time; it eventually made its way to the Russell Collection in Edinburgh.For the redecoration, see O'Brien, who discusses the clear evidence that redecoration had taken place, without necessarily assuming that the redecoration was done by the Franciolinis. The redecorated version clearly matches the style of other Franciolini instruments portrayed in Ripin (1974). O'Brien both reproduces the Franciolini sales photograph and provides an image of the instrument in its current state.