Such challenges to the past have undoubtedly inspired men who were or ultimately became professional forgers. This seems to have been the case with Giovanni Bastianini (1830-1868), the Italian sculptor. His admiration for early Renaissance Italian sculpture bred in him a spirit of rivalry which issued in the production of remarkable imitations to be exploited as originals through collaboration with a dealer. Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) also seems to have wanted to prove himself the equal of earlier sculptors, though later he knowingly embarked on the making of forgeries of medieval and Renaissance Italian sculpture, skillful enough to be purchased as originals by various museums. The case for conscious rivalry with the past is clearer with Rouchomovski, the nineteenth-century goldsmith, whose abilities, though sufficient to give him a reputation in his own right, led him to make the famous tiara of Saitaphernes, which was purchased by the Louvre as Greco-Scythian work of the third century B.C. With other forgers, however, desire to confound connoisseurs and the learned world has been uppermost, generally bred by neglect or adverse criticism. So it seems to have been with Thomas Chatterton and his eighteenth-century imitations of medieval poems; perhaps it operated in the case of T. J. Wise and his forgeries of nineteenth-century pamphlets; and apparently I. F. Ioni, the Sienese painter and restorer, well-known for his forgeries of Italian primitive paintings, derived at least as much satisfaction from trying to take in eminent authorities as from the money he made. Certainly such motives inspired H. A. Van Meegeren, the most famous forger of our time. Van Meegeren, a dexterous painter, skillful in imitating others, did not receive the recognition to which he felt his gifts entitled him, and turned his talents to forging the great Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. In 1937 he achieved spectacular success with his sale to the Rotterdam museum for $200,000 of his _Disciples at Emmaus_, as an early work by Jan Vermeer. A vivid light is thrown on his motives by a remark he made in 1947 after his arrest and trial: “The _Disciples_ represented the master-stroke in my plan for vengeance.” Later, the desire to fill his pockets seems to have become paramount. A similar case may be that of the Piltdown skull, once thought to be the earliest surviving relic of prehistoric man. Recent intensive examination has proved that though the cranium is of respectable antiquity, the lower jaw is that of a chimpanzee doctored to appear ancient; and there is some reason to think that it was made and planted near where the cranium was found, by a disgruntled museum technician who wished to prove that he could fool the learned world. [Illustration: LEFT: A forgery by Giovanni Bastianini, part copy and part style imitation. RIGHT: A fragment of an original relief by Desiderio da Settignano on which the forgery was based.]