When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610 was one of its most prized possessions, it was in fact a 20th-century forgery. The checkered pattern and diverse careers have attracted new attention. Man named as probable culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious counterfeiter from Milan.
Nicotra tricked the Library of Congress into buying fake Mozart manuscripts in 1928. He wrote an early biography of conductor Arturo Toscanini, but he became known more for fiction than fact. He traveled in the name of another famous conductor who had recently passed away. And in 1934, after Toscanini’s son Walter, who bought a counterfeit Mozart from Toscanini, called the police, he was found guilty of forgery in Milan.
At least, according to a description of his trial published in Hearst’s publication, American Weekly, in early 1935, his account of his many forgery motives, said to number in the hundreds, is somewhat muted. It was unusual.
“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”
When police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets believed it had signatures from Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette and Martin Luther. It reported that it had discovered a hypothetical forgery factory littered with forged documents. , Warren G. Harding, and other famous figures.
At least according to The American Weekly, investigators had also found what appeared to be a shrine dedicated to his seven mistresses. It was decorated with paintings, sketches and photographs of women. front of each. “The photographs were, at times, surprisingly frankly physical, but generally very artistic,” says the article.
“He had a wife, by the way,” the magazine added.
Over the years, Nicotra’s counterfeiting has deceived and confused collectors and institutions, collecting musical manuscripts, and a respected Austrian man who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra a counterfeiter. Nicotra’s return to the news was attributed to the Galileo forgery scandal in Michigan, when historian Nick Wilding of Georgia State University found that the paper Galileo was written on was watermarked from the late 18th century. It’s been over 150 years since Galileo was said to have written it. He also associated it with several other Nicotra counterfeits.
Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra, “Either he thought he was invincible, or he was incredibly desperate.” Counterfeiters were more prolific, but few are as daring and talented.
“Everything Nicotra does is plausible. No jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try to get it right.”
Given that there is relatively little specific information about Nicotra, and that he was a professional counterfeiter, the existing documentary evidence should not be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts seem to be away from him,” Wilding said. According to some reports, he was 53 years old at the time of his trial, but his birth certificate suggests he may have been his 44th. prolific career.
Courtroom sketches of Nicotra, published in The American Weekly, show him with glasses over a pointed nose, a mustache and beard, and wearing something like a thick scarf or furry astrakhan. It depicts him as a balding, thin-faced man wearing a cloak. the collar of his coat.
Nicotra seems to have had a real talent and erudition, casting a wide net over the types of documents he forged. He is said to have caused a minor international incident by forging musical manuscripts by Columbus and creating fake Columbus letters identifying his birthplace as Spain rather than Italy, prompting the mayor. Genova writes a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.
An article about the 1934 Associated Press conviction, published in the New York Times under the headline “Sign Forger Sentenced to Jail,” explains how Nicotra acted: increase. He steals old books, steals manuscript pages and writes “autographs” of famous musicians. A Milan librarian testified that he ruined dozens of books. “
In 1928, he sold the aria “Baci amorosi e cari”, which Mozart supposedly wrote when he was 14, to the Library of Congress.
Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music bibliography expert at the Library of Congress, said in an interview, “It was very special, because it was, first of all, unknown. It was not reported in any of Mozart’s subject catalogues.” “He claimed to have found this manuscript and published the song.”
The library paid $60 for the document, which was later thought to have been written by Nicotra himself.
Nikotra wrote in a letter that he was the son of a professor of botany and graduated in 1909 with a degree in music from the Naples Conservatory. .
When he published Toscanini’s biography in 1929, early critics found it to contain many errors. Today it is considered even less reliable.
Harvey Sachs, author of the definitive 2017 biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, said: “Just a made-up story.”
In 1932 Nicotra was the conductor of the Russian Imperial Ballet and an Italian conductor and composer who may be best known for his arrangement of Swan Lake, which he created after the death of Tchaikovsky. Toured the US impersonating a certain Riccardo Drigo. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra was “widely admired in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Tsar of Russia.”) Apparently, no one was aware that Dorrigo died two years earlier, in 1930. rice field.
Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014, said, “Boldness would be the main way to characterize him. He could keep doing this for years.”
Nicotra was also known for forging works by the early 18th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who died at the age of 26, and his posthumous fame attracted counterfeiters. One Pergolesi forgery was included in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s put it up for auction in 2017, it described it as “an interesting forgery that was once thought to belong to the hotly debated canon of Pergolesi” and was “made by prolific counterfeiter Tobia Nikotra. It was $375.
Galileo’s discovery leaves the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, possibly as many as 600.
“I don’t know if he made 600, but I’m sure he did more than what little has been discovered so far,” said Emeritus Associate Professor of Music at the University of Maryland. Richard G. King said. He studies Nicotra. “I don’t think people are deliberately hiding these things, they’re just hard to find.”
Wilding said it may be difficult to identify other counterfeits unless there is a record that the agency purchased the documents from Nicotra. He suggested that numerical documents lacking a clear provenance before the 20th century, which Nicotra habitually forged, “would be worth a very, very close scrutiny.”
Nicotra sold the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who eventually broke the law after convincing a Milan detective to investigate the case. Nicotra was found guilty and fined 2,400 lira and he was sentenced to two years in prison.
There are also reports that Nicotra was released from prison early because the fascist government sought his help in forging signatures. As for the story, Wilding said: