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 inThe 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. 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. 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, substantially outnumbering the one three-manual harpsichord known to be historically authentic. 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
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 ranciolini'scatalogue 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."
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. According to Ripin, the source of Franciolini's legal trouble was his dealings with another sharp operator. A Count Passerini 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. 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 inA 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; 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 ''Franciolini was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison. This was commuted to a fine of 1000 lire.celluloid Celluloids are a class of materials produced by mixing nitrocellulose and camphor, often with added dyes and other agents. Once much more common for its use as photographic film before the advent of safer methods, celluloid's common present-day ...''; a ''cello'' attributed to '' Andrea Guarnieri'' no less ''and another to Della Corna of Brescia'' were instead no more than unskilled and patent forgeries.
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, 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. A particularly brazen sale appears to have taken place in 1911. As the ''Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau'' reported, 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. Franciolini really did die in 1920 (10 February, of bronchial pneumonia), but the business still continued under the direction of his sons. However, Ripin notes (p. xv) that by then "the halcyon days were over. The large-scale and frequently indiscriminate collecting of Italian works of art that characterized the late 19th century and early years of the 20th came to an end with a gradual increase in the expertise of museum curators and private collectors alike." The Franciolini family business gradually wound down, and at least one of his sons found a new occupation.Coping with Franciolini frauds in modern times
Museums and curators
Scholars
The musical instrument scholar Edwin Ripin helped to clean up the scholarly mess Franciolini created by publishing an edition of Franciolini's own sales catalogs (Ripin 1974, cited below). Brauchli (1998) writes that thanks to Ripin's research and publication, "most of the altered and fraudulent instruments in museums and collections throughout the world have now been identified." This may be optimistic; Kottick and Lucktenberg (1997)'s survey of musical instrument museums contains multiple references to instruments that are likely – not certain – to be Franciolini material. And even when an instrument is known to have passed through Franciolini's hands, doubt can remain about the degree of falsification it underwent. For instance, the following description appears on the web site of the Stearns Collection in Ann Arbor (catalogue #1333):This harpsichord features an inscription of “Christoforus Rigunini, Firenze, A.D. 1602,” which, if true, makes it one of the oldest keyboards in the Stearns Collection. It comes to us, however, through the nefarious instrument dealer, Leopoldo Franciolini. One could say that it is the only surviving instrument ever crafted by the maker Rigunini, however, given that not a single person by the name of Rigunini ever seems to have drawn breath, we might assume that Franciolini invented the name and forged the date. When John Koster examined the instrument in 2006, however, he wrote, “The original single-strung disposition, seldom made after the early seventeenth century, would suggest a relatively early date for the instrument.”The Franciolini-altered instruments offer an interesting challenge and indeed enjoyment to modern scholars – harpsichord expert Denzil Wraight has said that "unravelling the tangle of Franciolini forgeries provides some harmless amusement." Wraight's remark comes from a scholarly article in which he reasons his way to the conclusion that the three-manual harpsichord in the Deutsches Museum, attributed by Franciolini to Bartolomeo Cristofori, was in fact originally a single-manual instrument built in 1658 by Girolamo Zenti. The three-manual harpsichord in the National Music Museum (described above) was studied in detail by John Koster during the time it was in his possession. Koster's attribution of the instrument to Sodi was not difficult since Franciolini had neglected to obliterate the signature Sodi placed on a soundboard rib. Koster's scholarly paper on this instrument (1999) focuses instead on what knowledge can be retrieved about the original Sodi fortepiano from the converted harpsichord. Similar detective work has been carried out by Grant O'Brien on the three-manual Franciolini-altered Bolcioni instrument in the Russell Collection in Edinburgh, mentioned above.
Dealers and auction houses
A modern auction house that values its trustworthy reputation must sell an old Franciolini instrument with circumspection. Thus, when theNotes
References
The primary reference source on Franciolini's career is: *Ripin, Edwin M. (1974) ''The instrument catalogs of Leopoldo Franciolini''. J. Boonin. It includes both the catalogs as well as contemporary reports from the courts, newspapers, and journals. It also includes Ripin's own commentaries and historical reconstruction of the crime that lead to Franciolini's conviction. Other works consulted: *Brauchli, Bernard (1998) ''The clavichord''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Includes a brief summary of the events of Franciolini's prosecution. *Koster, John (1999) Three grand pianos in the Florentine tradition. ''Musique, images, instruments'' 4:94–116. The last of the three pianos discussed is the three-manual Franciolini makeover. Available on lineExternal links
*A discussion-board note on Franciolini's fraudulent