Il falsario Sententiosus

An obviously fake inscription from a recently published collection helps unmasking another inscribed monument, whose genuineness was never doubted so far: a fortunate coincidence allows us to prove beyond reasonable doubt that both were indeed crafted by one and the same hand as part of a rather unique series of forgeries, perhaps drawing from a modern collection of Latin sententiae, captioning macabre imagery. Although both items were on the market in Rome in the early 1900s amidst a plethora of genuine inscriptions from recent excavations, it cannot be safely ruled out that they had been circulating for a long time before that.