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Rowland, Ingrid. The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. x + 230 pp. £16.00/$22.50. ISBN 0–226–73037–9, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm107
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Extract
The book reconstructs in a captivating and vivacious style the crafty archaeological fraud that nineteen-year-old Curzio Inghirami designed in 1624 while at the family villa, Scornello, near Volterra. Here, he claimed to have found some revealing Etruscan documents contained in the so-called scaritti – capsules made of hair and mud. Although modern researchers can spot at first glance the deceitful nature of Curzio's findings, these cunningly relied on the established Etruscan connections of the area and the fact that no one could actually read Etruscan writing at the time. So, when recorded in the Ethruscarum antiquitatum fragmenta, they naturally generated a great deal of interest and controversy, involving cultural and political authorities as eminent as the Vatican. This is less surprising when we consider the unmistakable ideological bias of Inghirami's book. Highlighting its significant connections with the events shaping the cultural context of seventeenth-century Italy, Rowland convincingly illustrates the ideological purpose of such a bold and intriguing cultural experiment. At the time of Galileo's condemnation, Curzio offered an allegedly authoritative description, strikingly analogous to the circumstances of his own time, of Rome's tyrannical rule over the Etruscans, who were unjustly and cruelly subjugated. His scaritti, then, far from being the playful trick of a bored youth, constitute a conscious act of propaganda against Rome's repressive control, which was no longer military but – more intolerably – cultural.
