Ivory work too, which represents one of the most dangerous fields to neophytic enterprise, requires no special technique in counterfeiting as far as the artistic creation is concerned. It must also be tempting to the carver as a material, for certain naïve effects of primitive art seem aided by the essential qualities of the ivory, its fibrous constitution in particular. One may safely say that there is nowadays hardly a single genuine Byzantine Christ; there are, however, plenty on the market of course. The old cracks of antique ivory are very easily imitated. There is more than one method for producing them, the most common is to plunge the piece into boiling water and then dry quickly before a fire. The operation can of course be repeated until the desired effect is attained. Here also smoke and tobacco-juice can perform miracles. Sometimes ivory pieces are placed in a fermenting heap of fertilizer or wet hay. The methods are, in fact, most varied, and an inventive spirit seems of great assistance to the faker in devising new schemes every day. We now come to the last class of this chapter, ceroplastics, which includes all forms of modelled wax, small bas-reliefs supposed to have been the originals of _plaquettes_, little family portraits in coloured wax, etc. In this branch, patina and complicated methods to attain an appearance of age hardly come into consideration, a mere touch of the hand is at times sufficient to stain the wax, and work of this kind takes the colouring so readily after it is modelled that no craft is needed in imitating old wax work, provided the artist is able to imitate the antique handiwork. Besides, wax portraits have been for the most part kept under glass and have come down to us as fresh as though made yesterday, not only those of a century or two ago but also those that have reached a most respectable centennial age. Wax work is one of the easiest to imitate and one of the most difficult to detect when imitated. We are therefore inclined to advise the freshman collector to abstain from buying this kind of work, unless irrefutable documentary evidence is offered in the shape of a well-authenticated pedigree of the work. CHAPTER XXI FAKED POTTERY Faked pottery--Old unglazed types--Artistic and scientific interest in pottery--Oriental glazed pottery--Greek and Etruscan half-glazed vases--Faience and its various types-- Italian factories, Cafaggiolo, Urbino, etc.--Iridescent glazes, Hispano-Moresque, Deruta and Gubbio--French pottery--Faked Palissy and imitations of Henri II--Other types of French faience--China, the old and modern composition of china-- Various ways of faking china of good marks--Half-faked pieces --Blunders in marks--Glasses and enamels. Pottery presents one of the richest and most varied fields for imitation and faking. The endless types and specialities of this class seem to have spurred the versatile genius of the imitator.