The Adoration with the Virgin, Saints John the Baptist and Joseph, with an Augustine and a Benedictine monk and three angels, an extensive river landscape beyond

We are grateful to Everett Fahy for proposing the attribution, on the basis of photographs and for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. In his analysis of the different types of fakes produced in the past, Andrea G. De Marchi (op. cit.) includes this painting in the most common group; real old paintings with a fake signature. This is possibly the oldest method employed to deceive, whether it be for the promotion of a minor artist to a renowned master for economical motives, or to aggrandize the picture's place in art history by associating the work with an important painter or apocryphal hand recorded in the literature.
In this specific case, De Marchi suggests that the signature and date might have been added in the early 20th century when merchants needed to satisfy the most avid collectors with names that were immediately recognisable. At that time, the development of connoisseurship was not sufficiently advanced to identify spurious signatures and, for some collectors, the name of the author was more important than the work itself; Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora could then be mistaken for Lippi, even if active some decades later.