Maggie Cao

Maggie Cao is an assistant professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She studies the intersections of art with histories of science and economics in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is writing a book on the end of the American landscape tradition.


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Writing on Public Books

Forgery Fiction

Even Michelangelo was guilty of forgery. As the story goes, the young artist buried a sleeping Cupid he carved from marble so that it would pass as a Greco-Roman antiquity. Upon learning of its true maker, the buyer, Cardinal Raffaello Riario, returned the piece to his dealer for a full refund. The unfortunate Cardinal, though […]