Leopoldo Franciolini

[4] Franciolini's modifications of old instruments are often crude, involving, for instance, naive forms of decorative art, as well as misspellings of builder's names and errors in Latin mottos.

[10] Franciolini worked at a time when many of the great musical instrument collections (stored in museums today) were being built up through purchase by individual wealthy collectors.

For instance, the early music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch, himself a builder, frequented Franciolini's shop, and easily spotted the frauds happening there.

It is possible, according to Kottick, that some of Franciolini's customers didn't really care about fraud, since their interest was in early instruments as vivid decorative objects, not as scholarly artifacts.

[6] This view is also taken by the modern luthier/dealer Sinier de Ridder, who suggests moreover that Franciolini "was not the only one to offer to a rich clientele musical objects intended for decoration.

A Count Passerini[15] bought a large group of instruments, including fraudulent ones, from Franciolini, and resold them at a higher price to Wilhelm Heyer, an outstanding German collector in Cologne.

[16] Passerini added his own deception: he concealed the fact that he had purchased them from Franciolini, and claimed instead that the instruments had been found in a palazzo in Siena.

[17] On ascertaining the deception Heyer returned the collection to Count Passerini, who sued Franciolini as well as filing a complaint with the state prosecutor.

"[19] Franciolini's trial in 1910 attracted considerable attention; it was reported in La Nazione that "a large audience composed of antiquaries, art connoisseurs, artists, etc."

[21] A certain virginal, for example, ... was made from piano keys joined together in pairs and filed down and encased in such a way that they could not be able to accomplish the purpose for which they had been intended; a clavicytherium attributed to Sixtus V was nothing but a housing into which the parts of some instrument had been introduced, together with pieces of new wood hidden by a patina intended to simulate age;[22] a small organ catalogued as being from the Empire period had pasted inside it a list of modern tunes, among which were Bellini's Norma and Sonnambula, a chitarrone said to be inlaid with ivory (according to the catalog) was instead mere celluloid; a cello attributed to Andrea Guarnieri no less and another to Della Corna of Brescia were instead no more than unskilled and patent forgeries.

The large-scale and frequently indiscriminate collecting of Italian works of art that characterized the late 19th century and early years of the 20th came to an end with a gradual increase in the expertise of museum curators and private collectors alike."

For example, the Stearns Collection, noted above, scrupulously notifies its patrons on its website and gallery entrance that many of the instruments it owns are Franciolini items.

[36] Thus, a visually spectacular three-manual harpsichord from Franciolini's shop was long a prominent item displayed in the musical instrument gallery of the Deutsches Museum in Munich[37] but is no longer viewable.

None of the 14 Franciolini-derived instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is on public view,[38] nor were (as of 2014) any of the 38 Franciolini items listed on the web site of the Stearns collection.

One example is a three-manual harpsichord that Franciolini sold in 1900 to the great collector Mary Elizabeth Brown, who installed it in her closely affiliated collection at the Metropolitan Museum.

When John Koster examined the instrument in 2006, however, he wrote, “The original single-strung disposition, seldom made after the early seventeenth century, would suggest a relatively early date for the instrument.”[43] The Franciolini-altered instruments offer an interesting challenge and indeed enjoyment to modern scholars – harpsichord expert Denzil Wraight has said that "unravelling the tangle of Franciolini forgeries provides some harmless amusement."

Wraight's remark comes from a scholarly article in which he reasons his way to the conclusion that the three-manual harpsichord in the Deutsches Museum, attributed by Franciolini to Bartolomeo Cristofori, was in fact originally a single-manual instrument built in 1658 by Girolamo Zenti.

Similar detective work has been carried out by Grant O'Brien on the three-manual Franciolini-altered Bolcioni instrument in the Russell Collection in Edinburgh, mentioned above.

[47] The primary reference source on Franciolini's career is: It includes both the catalogs as well as contemporary reports from the courts, newspapers, and journals.