Provenance Studies and the Passion for Ivory Artifacts

In 1929 Richard Delbrueck published one of the two main works on which modern study of the consular diptychs is founded. Aware of sixty-five examples (preserved either in whole or in part; we now know of a few more), in Die Consulardiptychen und verwandte Denkmäler he sought to establish the identities and thus the dates when Roman and Constantinopolitan dignitaries presented these huge ivories to their aristocratic peers. Delbueck’s evidence was primarily iconographical and epigraphic, a strategy shared with the other foundational work, Anton Francesco Gori’s richly illustrated Thesaurus veterum diptychorum consularium et ecelesiasticorum... (Florence 1759). This three-volume corpus resulted not from Gori’s unmediated experience of the objects in question but from his correspondence with collectors and scholars – a network in which he was the principal link – and whose passion for possession is the topic of this paper. Not all the evidence is textual. In a private collection in Milan there is a canvas showing Don Carlo Trivulzio ("il grande raccoglitore", 1715 -1789) in the midst of his collection, with a small framed copy of the Aldobrandini Wedding. But pride of place is awarded to three consular diptychs: that of Justinian (521) now in the Castello Sforzesco; the Orestes (530) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, since 1866, acquired from the Museum Settalianum in Milan via the Trivulzio and Soltykoff collections; and one of the two Areobindus (506) diptychs in the Louvre (OA 9525) in its unbroken state.