[Fake medieval illuminated antiphonary leaf displaying the Tiburtine Sybil and the Emperor Augustus]

[Fake medieval illuminated antiphonary leaf displaying the Tiburtine Sybil and the Emperor Augustus]

Author: [‘Spanish Forger’]

Year: 1890

560 x 395 mm, the central panel 380 x 236 mm. f. 1. Large-scale “miniature” on parchment in red, green, blue, and yellow with burnished gold applied to a reused leaf from a genuine late-medieval service book. The recto on which the illumination appears was scraped to remove its red and black textual and musical stave notations. This fake medieval illumination is one of the more than 400 identified works by the anonymous ‘Spanish Forger,’ who created a vast number of forged medieval miniatures in the late 19th to early 20th century. The subject of the central panel is the legend of the Tiburtine Sibyl who purportedly revealed a celestial vision of the Virgin and Child to Emperor Augustus Caesar. According to the tale, the Roman Senate had decreed the apotheosis (i.e., the deification) of Augustus; the Emperor, in turn, consulted the Sibyl to determine whether he should accept this honor. The Sibyl’s response was to foretell the future coming of a child (i.e., Jesus Christ) who would be greater than all the gods in the Roman pantheon (cf. the so-called pagan oracular “Sibylline Books,” late-antique Hellenistic Judeo-Christian forgeries retrojecting pagan predictions of the coming of