# The complete object is a temporary arrangement > For a dispersed set, being complete is an event with a date and a duration. Twelve Renaissance tazze were whole and correct for two days in 2014, and have not been since. > The Study - 2026-09-27 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-complete-object-is-a-temporary-arrangement/ ## Key points - Twelve silver tazze made in the 1590s were correctly assembled and in one room for two days, on 18 and 19 June 2014, and no reunion of the set has been found since 2018. Being complete was an event, not a state. - By the end of the nineteenth century only two of the twelve were on the right dish. The Victoria and Albert Museum's tazza still carries the Domitian figure over a dish about Tiberius, because the statuettes are labelled and the dishes are not. - The Beauvais Missal has 122 of its 309 leaves located across more than a hundred collections. The only version of the whole book that exists is a virtual reconstruction, assembled partly by matching the offset that gold on one leaf left on the next. - The David vases were apart from 1351 until 1935, then on long-term loan to the British Museum from 2009, and only became the museum's property on 2 April 2025. A loan ran for sixteen years before ownership caught up with the display. - A loan exhibition can do something no owner can do alone: assemble an object that is legally in twelve places. It cannot make the arrangement last. ## A set of twelve is an argument that only works complete ## The emperors are labelled and the dishes are not ## June 2014: the whole set in one room, for two days ## 309 leaves, 122 located, and a reconstruction that will not finish ## The David vases were apart for 584 years and on loan for sixteen ## One plate standing in for more than two thousand ## Four kinds of completeness, and how long each one lasted ## What an exhibition can do that an owner cannot ## Why this archive is free to read The label on a case tells you where an object is, and for a dispersed set that is the least interesting fact about it. What a reader needs is the extent: how many pieces there were, how many are located, where the rest went and whether the whole thing has ever been seen at once. For the tazze the answer is two days in June 2014, and for the Beauvais Missal it is never, in the form of a model that gets better every year. Those are different answers and both of them are worth printing. An object that exists in twelve places is not twelve objects, and a catalogue that treats each piece as a work in its own right has quietly agreed with whoever broke it up. ## Questions **Why were the Aldobrandini tazze put back together wrongly?** Because the emperors unscrew from the dishes and the threads are interchangeable, while each statuette has its emperor's name incised on its pedestal and the dishes carry no name at all. Identifying a dish means reading its four scenes against Suetonius, so after the set was broken up in the nineteenth century the figures were reattached almost at random. **Have the twelve tazze ever been together since they were dispersed?** Yes, on 18 and 19 June 2014, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art assembled all twelve in New York for a symposium with an international group of specialists. They were together as loans and no ownership changed. No reunion of the set has been found since 2018. **How many leaves of the Beauvais Missal have been found?** 122 of the original 309, spread across more than a hundred institutional and private collections. The count rises as leaves surface, and a virtual reconstruction hosted by Fragmentarium assembles images of the located leaves in order, partly by matching the offset that gold on one leaf left on the next. **When did the British Museum actually come to own the David vases?** On 2 April 2025. The vases had been on display at the museum since Room 95 opened on 23 April 2009, but that was a long-term loan from the Percival David Foundation, which remained the legal owner until the Charity Commission approved the transfer in March 2025 and the gift was completed the following month. **Is a loan exhibition different from a museum showing its own collection?** For a dispersed object it is a different kind of act altogether. An owner can only assemble what they own, so an object legally divided between twelve holders can only be made whole by borrowing it for a fixed period, which means completeness has a start date, an end date and no permanence. ## Sources - [1] Julia Siemon (ed.), The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, the catalogue produced from the June 2014 gathering of all twelve tazze, with Mary Beard's translations of the forty-eight Suetonius passages. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for the Vitellius tazza, object 199659, bought with the Fletcher Fund in 1945. - [3] Victoria and Albert Museum, catalogue record O91721, the Aldobrandini tazza carrying the Domitian figure over a dish of scenes from the life of Tiberius. - [4] Fragmentarium, Beauvais Missal virtual reconstruction, F-4ihz, assembled by Lisa Fagin Davis. - [5] Lisa Fagin Davis, 'Manuscript Road Trip: Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal', 24 March 2015, on the method of pairing consecutive leaves by gold offset. - [6] Broken Books, 'The Story of the Beauvais Missal', on the October 1942 purchase from the Hearst collection through Gimbel Brothers and the dealer's commercial logic. - [7] Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access API record for accession 1982.141, a located leaf of the Beauvais Missal. - [8] Boston Public Library, 'Two leaves from the Beauvais Missal', via Digital Commonwealth. - [9] Antiques Trade Gazette, 'Percival David collection moves to British Museum', 2007, on the funding crisis and the long-term loan. - [10] Museums + Heritage Advisor, 'British Museum to receive historic 1bn collection gift', on the 2025 transfer of ownership of the Percival David collection. - [11] Cleveland Museum of Art, catalogue entry for Plate from the Swan Service, accession 1951.103. - [12] The Frick Collection, 'Cocktails with a Curator: Meissen Swan Service', on the scale and commission of the service for Heinrich Graf von Bruhl.