Antichitătile între original și fals, între inspirație și imitație. Despre o pereche de cercei din Colecția Orghidan
The Antiquities between Original and Fake, Between Inspiration and Imitation. About a Pair of Earrings from the Orghidan Collection

Summary/Abstract: The subject of the article is a pair of earrings from the Orghidan Collection. Although considered until now of ancient origin, they were proven, in fact, as made in the last third of the 19th century in the style of the “Archaeological Revival”. The earrings were crafted in Naples in the workshops of Giacinto Melillo, one of Alessandro Castellani’s apprentice and close collaborator. The attempt to capture and understand as well as possible the particularities of these ornaments inspired a review of the formal diversity of ancient and modern jewellery. The cultural context in which they were created was strongly influenced by the educational and leisure travels fashionable at the time and known as the Grand Tour. Many of those who dared to travel went to Italy, returning from this adventure with all sorts of souvenirs. During the same period, the number of “archaeological investigations” in the peninsula was on the increase, and they more often focused on the discovery of the most beautiful and impressive works of art, as objects to be sold later as profitable as possible. The increasing number of ancient jewellery pieces thus recovered generated, in turn, both an increase in the demand of the collectors, museums or various fine ladies, but also led to a better knowledge of their shapes, structure and specificity. Etruscan, Greek or Roman antiquities have thus become not only valuable sources of inspiration for the modern jewellery, but also prototypes for an important industry in which the boundaries between imitation, fake, pastiche or restoration were not yet very well established. The earrings in the Orghidan Collection are not fakes since they originated in a workshop that recognized and acknowledged its sources of inspiration, with the specificity of these jewellery stemming exactly from the artistry stimulated by the ancient artefacts. On the other hand, despite the fact inspiration from the Antiquity was an acknowledged reality, the resulted ornaments might have fused elements from different traditions, offering in the end only a reinterpretation. As collectible small artefacts, the story of the earrings was short-circuited somewhere along the way and, resembling so close to the acknowledged image of the ancient ornaments, they were included in this category, although they clearly have no analogies among the earrings of Hellenistic or Roman tradition, and despite the fact some of their structural or formal features are far from suggesting it.

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