In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of “goods” from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial “opening up” of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case studies involving Florence and Rome, and drawing on unpublished archival material, Lowe documents the myriad occasions on which global knowledge became dissociated from overseas objects, animals and people. Fundamental aspects of these imperial imports, including place of origin and provenance, she shows, failed to survive the voyage and make landfall in Europe. Lowe suggests that there were compelling reasons for not knowing or caring about provenance, and concludes that geographical knowledge, like all knowledge, was often restricted and not valued.
Examining such documents as ledger entries, journals and public and private correspondence as well as extant objects, and asking previously unasked questions, Lowe meticulously reconstructs the backstories of Portuguese imperial acquisitions, painstakingly supplying the context. She chronicles the phenomenon of mixed-ancestry children at Florence’s foundling hospital; the ownership of inanimate luxury goods, notably those possessed by the Medicis; and the acquisition of enslaved people and animals. How and where goods were acquired, Lowe argues, were of no interest to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians; possession was paramount.
K.J.P. Lowe is associate fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Her many books and edited volumes include Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe and The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon, the basis for a major exhibition at the Museu de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.
"Provenance and Possession deserves close reading by anyone interested in issues surrounding the ownership of global objects and the identity of forcibly displaced persons. . . .Lowe demonstrates the power of high-level archival research, in which unexpected treasures and questions can spring from documents at every turn."—Stefan Bauer, Times Literary Supplement
"Dr. Kate Lowe’s marvellous new book Provenance and Possession . . . is a revelation. . . . [It] presents a whole new way of thinking about provenance."—Michael Backman Ltd.
"Provenance has received increasing and urgent attention as a means for contemporary scholars, curators, and collectors to determine the authenticity, context, and meaning of a work. However, Lowe grounds her study in archival records and finds that provenance functioned differently in the record-keeping and collecting practices of the Italian Renaissance. . . . Lowe’s contributions offer productive, historically grounded methods to readdress discourses about collecting practices, and the agency and ontology of objects within history, art history, and material studies."—Araceli Bremauntz Enriquez, H-Net Reviews
“Fascinating and illuminating. What most distinguishes this book is the extraordinarily close reading of the archival sources (some of which Lowe has discovered—itself an astounding fact in the heavily utilized Florentine archive) coupled with a detailed examination of the extant objects. It is exciting to watch as Lowe weighs the evidence, rejects unwarranted assumptions, corrects previous scholarship, and admits when the trail runs cold.”—Dennis Romano, Syracuse University
“Lowe’s impressive mastery of archival materials is matched by her vast knowledge and shrewd use of secondary sources. The handling of the visual material (including cartography) is quite sophisticated, as one would expect from a historian who has had substantial experience with major museum exhibitions. The writing is generally clear and accessible, and often eloquent when it evokes the difficult lives of the enslaved.”—Paul Kaplan, Purchase College, SUNY
“In this extraordinarily thorough and thought-provoking book, stories of knowledge found and knowledge lost coalesce to form a radically novel image of the Renaissance: both cosmopolitan and parochial, capable of connecting peoples across oceans and generating chasms that remain with us to this day. A timely and troubling contribution, a must-read for anyone with an interest in early global history.”—Zoltán Biedermann, University College London
“K.J.P. Lowe transforms our understanding of how Renaissance Italy came to know the wider world. This is a beautifully researched book which interrogates the presence of global goods, exotic animals and enslaved people from the Portuguese empire in sixteenth-century Florence and Rome.”—Giuseppe Marcocci, University of Oxford
