Leopoldo Franciolini

Leopoldo Franciolini (1844–1920) was an Italian antique dealer who flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is remembered as a fraudster who sold faked and altered historical musical instruments. To this day his work is a barrier to the scholarly study of instruments of the past.

Little is known about Franciolini's life. According to census records he was born 1 March 1844, was married in 1879, and had six children of whom one died before reaching adulthood. The census listed his occupation as organist as well as antiquary. It is possible that he founded his workshop in 1879, a date listed on his catalogs. The workshop was at various locations in Florence; during part of its existence his business was housed in more than one location.

Franciolini repeatedly sold fake instruments or instruments that were modified in his workshop to make them more appealing to naïve buyers. For instance, he added various forms of decoration, or even entire extra keyboards to harpsichords. He also attached dates to instruments to make them seem older and gave them false signatures of builders. His modifications damaged the musical value of the instruments and especially their scholarly value, making them less useful in service of modern builders, who rely on historical instruments for their design.

As Ripin notes, it will not suffice for modern scholars or buyers simply to ignore all instruments that were once in Franciolini's possession, because a great number of valuable authentic instruments passed through his shop as well. These were sometimes modified to look more like the fraudulent instruments, thus giving the latter more credibility.

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. Kottick points out one harpsichord in which the bridge for the added, short-scale four-foot strings is not only crude but even larger than the main bridge, an absurdity in normal harpsichord construction. At one point early in his career, Franciolini was so ignorant as to produce a keyboard in which the sharps all fell in groups of three rather than the familiar alternating twos and threes.

A specialization of Franciolini was adding extra manuals (i.e. keyboards) to old harpsichords. For instance, Franciolini concocted a total of five three-manual harpsichords, substantially outnumbering the one three-manual harpsichord known to be historically authentic. The two-manual harpsichord was rare in Italy, and Kottick suggests that for essentially any museum instrument described as an Italian two-manual, it is likely that the second manual comes from Franciolini's workshop.

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. There was little published scholarship available to protect such buyers from falling victim to his frauds, and thus the collections passed on later to the museums were rife with them.

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