Many New Yorkers will remember with what bitter disillusion they learned, in the early 1980s, that one of the Metropolitan Museum’s most admired and precious Renaissance treasures was, in fact, a nineteenth-century concoction. Predictably, they may also have experienced a frisson of satisfaction that, yet again, those learned, pompous art historians and connoisseurs had been duped, this time for decades on end. In fact, the glorious, and gloriously extravagant, “Rospigliosi Cup” turned out to be the inspired invention of a supremely gifted but totally obscure Aachen goldsmith named Reinhold Vasters (1827–1909). The magnificent gold and jewel-encrusted object had entered the museum in 1913 with the Benjamin Altman bequest as a work of none other than Benvenuto Cellini. By a striking coincidence, only a few years after the “Cellini” cup was grandly installed at the Metropolitan, a huge cache of Vasters drawings was given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London—and then promptly forgotten. It was not until 1975 that the perceptive eye of the scholars Charles Truman and Yvonne Hackenbroch made the connection between some of the hundreds of careful preparatory sketches and the “Rospigliosi Cup.” Not surprisingly, dozens more heretofore prized “Renaissance” jewels in distinguished private and public collections the world over were soon recognized among the Vasters drawings and thus attributed to his workshop.

The sensational discovery occurred just at a time when postmodern attitudes in the interpretation and practice of art history were evolving and gaining credence. Forgeries and their makers were beginning to