Forgery, replica, fiction

de Christopher S. Wood

"Wood shows that over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, emerging replication technologies - such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type - altered the relationship between artifacts and time. Mechanization highlighted the dependence of all transmission processes on the artifice, materials, and individual authorship necessary to create an object, calling into question the replica's ability to represent a history that was not its own. Meanwhile, print catalyzed the new discipline of archaeological scholarship, which began to draw sharp distinctions between true and false claims about the past. Ultimately, as forged copies lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the deliberately fictional construct we have come to understand as the work of art."--BOOK JACKET.