On Collecting the Broken and the Given
A votive figure made to be offered, a manuscript leaf cut from its book — and what a collection owes to the objects history has taken apart.
By Hélène Marchetti
Two objects in the Collection were never meant to be collected. One is a bronze votive figure, cast to be given away as an offering. The other is a single illuminated leaf, cut long ago from a choir book and sold apart from its body. Both arrive to us already incomplete — one by intention, one by violence.
To hold them is to inherit a question. What does a collection owe to the fragment? Not, we think, the pretense of wholeness. A leaf is not a book; a votive kept is no longer a votive given. The honest course is to keep the seam visible — to let the object tell, plainly, what was done to it.
An honest collection keeps the seam visible.
So we conserve without disguising, we publish provenance in full, and where reunion with a parent object or a place of origin is possible and right, we treat it as an open question rather than a closed door. Stewardship, properly understood, is custody with the lights on.