[Συμαϊς. Autograph manuscript of 52 leaves in (demotic) Greek minuscule, purporting to be a history of Byzantine painting on the island Syme by Meletios of Chios, written on Athos]

ff. 52. Middle Hill boards, formerly Phillipps MS 13,872.

This codex of 52 leaves in Greek minuscule on artificially aged vellum claims to be a history of Byzantine painting in Simonides’ native island of Syme; purportedly by one Meletios, a monk of Chios, and completed on Mount Athos, in the 17th century or earlier, but was in fact written around 1850.The text is the pseudonymous composition of the versatile Greek forger Constantine Simonides (1820-1870), who fooled several major collectors into paying substantial sums for his wares during his various bookselling visits to London in the 1850s and 1860s. It was published by him at Athens in 1849, and subsequently written out by him on artificially aged vellum, and sold to the energetic early manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1854, who was one of Simonides’s principal victims. Phillipps acquired several impossibly rare ancient Greek manuscript fragments from Simonides, and usually published a lithographic facsimile of these manuscripts at his private Middle Hill press.

The present work is an understudied, spectacular effort by Simonides to fill one of the greatest gaping holes in the history of art by using his own fertile imagination and native command of Greek. In the Robinson brothers’ dispersals of Phillipps MSS (Sotheby’s, July 1972, lot 1731) it was purchased by Pickering and Chatto for the Earl of Perth, and at the Perth sale (Christie’s, 2 November 2003) acquired by Arthur and Janet Freeman. See E. Havens, “Babelic Confusion. Literary Forgery and the Bibliotheca Fictiva,” in W. Stephens & E. Havens (eds.), Literary forgery in early modern Europe, 1450-1800, Baltimore, 2018, p. 64.

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