"If a forgery, "Orlandini's Decameron" is also an early assay in that
field."
John Barton
It is an early European forgery. I have previously pointed out that
forgeries of Chinese books date from about 1200 or earlier (see the
Exlkibris archives under Forgeries of Chinese books). This would be very
easy to do since the Chinese characters could be traced from the blocks by
paper and exact blocks cut. For perfection the paper would have to be
matched or else old paper used. By the way it did and does exist: Picasso
used 17th century paper for some of his drawings (or at least owned some)
and many old European books contain blank pages.
I understand a facsimile to be an exact copy of the actual text and
therefore this could only be done with the invention of photography. Hence
the date of the first facsimile must be after the invention of photography.
The work John Barton is referring to is a copy. It only becomes a forgery
when it is passed off as the real work: the crucial issue here is intent.
Paul Knobel