![]() That document, a 1607 letter to an unknown recipient, almost exactly matched a letter Wilding discovered in Italian archives - raising Wilding’s suspicions. Wilding’s search for the monogram turned up another Galileo document at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which had a slightly different watermark with the same monogram. “As soon as I heard the word ‘Nicotra,’ I got the little ‘Spidey sense,’” Wilding said.Īlvarez drove the document over to Michigan’s conservation laboratory, where Amy Crist, the library’s book and paper conservator, found that the ink and paper were consistent with the period - giving Alvarez a glimmer of hope that it was authentic. Those documents, Wilding discovered, had been given to him by Tobia Nicotra - a notorious 20th-century counterfeiter in Milan. The provenance information raised red flags: The auction catalog said it had been authenticated by Cardinal Pietro Maffi, an archbishop of Pisa who died in 1931, who had compared it to two Galileo autograph documents in his collection. Wilding emailed the library in May to ask for more provenance information and to request an image of the document’s watermark - an insignia visible when held to the light that can indicate where and when the paper was made. It first appeared at auction in 1934, when it was purchased by a Detroit businessman, and it was bequeathed to the university in 1938 after his death. ![]() Wilding, who teaches a summer course on forgery at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, began to research the Michigan document, and found there was no record of it in Italian archives. Why is it all exactly the same color brown?” “This is supposedly two different documents that happen to be on one sheet of paper. “It just kind of jumps out as weird,” Wilding said. Some of the letter forms and word choices seemed strange to him, and even though the top and bottom were supposedly written months apart, the ink seemed remarkably similar. He became suspicious of the Michigan manuscript in May while examining an online image of it. ![]() Wilding, who is writing a biography of Galileo, has uncovered forged Galileo works before: he previously found evidence that a copy of Galileo’s 1610 treatise “Sidereus Nuncius” (“Starry Messenger”), with several watercolors, was a fake. “To sweep it under the rug is counter to what we stand for.” ![]() But since the purpose of any library is to expand knowledge, she said, the university had decided to be forthright about its findings and publicly announce the forgery. Hayward, the interim dean of the university’s libraries, said in an interview. “It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo,” Donna L. ![]()
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