How
to Forge a Career in Seventeenth-Century Italy:
the Example of Curzio Inghirami, Defender of the Etruscan Antiquities
Ingrid D. Rowland
The young Volterran nobleman Curzio Inghirami (1614-1655) was born into an impoverished branch of his large family at a time when the fortunes of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany were declining precipitously, culminating in the resurgence of plague in 1631. Destined by his ambitious father for a legal career in the Tuscan bureaucracy, the nineteen-year-old Curzio avoided a fate he claims to have dreaded by forging and burying a series of purported Etruscan documents that he traced to the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy. The staged "discovery" of these texts in 1634 allowed Inghirami to create a unique place for himself within Tuscan society, as he assumed the mantle of "Defender of the Etruscan Antiquities," a position he retained for the rest of his life.
His own autobiographical notes tell the whole story with Curzio's characteristic
wit; what these notes fail to reveal are his further adventures as a forger,
which were many. His model for this secret career was a Dominican friar
of the fifteenth century, Annius of Viterbo, the most famous of all forgers
of Etruscan antiquities, but Curzio also drew on the legacies of the sixteenth-century
linguist Guillaume Postel and the dissolute seventeenth-century Scots
expatriate Thomas Dempster, both of whom had also enhanced the body of
Etruscan lore by creative means.
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