ABSTRACT
Happy is she who spends her life in the domain of the beautiful, the historically situated, the authentic. Even before the time when Annemarie Weyl Carr progressed from the realm of manuscript illumination to that of works on a larger scale-above all, wall-and icon-painting on Cyprus-she has shown a healthy (and all too rare) skepticism about her own opinions. I think particularly of the moment when, six years after she first attributed a psalter in Athens to Cyprus and 14 years after she first set foot there, she realized that “there was not room on the island for the sheep whose skins comprise the many ‘decorative style’ books, much less for the people who consumed the mutton and commissioned the books.”1 What she has never needed to doubt is the genuineness of the things that she deals with. While their dates, places of origin, and meanings may be the subject of debate, their authenticity is not in question-a blessed state, not given to us who labor in the vexed field of ivory carving. To signal my appreciation for Annemarie’s life’s work and, no less important, our friendship of a lifetime, I offer this little study of what is indubitably a fake but, one that, uniquely in my experience, was-as an Elizabethan poet might describe it-“twyborn.”
