When the Owner's Name Becomes the Object's Name

The personal name in a title is rarely the maker's

When an object in this archive carries a person's name in its title, that person is almost never the one who made it. The Blacas Ewer is named for Louis, Duc de Blacas d'Aulps, from whom the British Museum bought a collection in 1866. The Bobrinski Bucket is named for the Russian count in whose collection it sat before the Hermitage received it. The Wade Cup is named for a Cleveland endowment. This archive's records for the Graves Tompion and the Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet show the same shape, each object carrying the surname of a collection it passed through. In none of these cases does the name describe the object, its subject, its place of manufacture or its function.

This is not a complaint about romance in cataloguing. The names are load-bearing: they are how the literature is indexed, and abandoning them would sever the object from eighty or a hundred years of scholarship written under them. The problem is narrower and more practical. A name of this kind looks like an attribution and is not one, and a reader who has met the object only through its name has been told something about a nineteenth-century collector and nothing about the thing itself.

The place it does real damage is a search. A researcher looking for the earliest dated inlaid brass from Herat will not find the Bobrinski Bucket by searching for Herat, a date, or the men who made it, because the object is filed under a surname none of them bore.

The archive's Islamic metalwork inverts the evidence

The objects most thoroughly buried under an owner's name here are precisely the ones whose makers left the fullest record of themselves. Medieval Islamic inlaid metalwork is unusual in its genre for carrying signatures and dates, and three of this archive's records carry them in abundance.

The Bobrinski Bucket is dated by its own inscription to Muharram 559 AH, December 1163, and three separate inscriptions across its handle, rim and body name the two craftsmen who made it, the man who commissioned it, and the Herat merchant it was made for. It is one of the earliest firmly dated and signed pieces of Islamic inlaid metalwork known, and it is the fixed point against which an entire undated corpus of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Khurasan bronzes has been classified. It has nonetheless been the Bobrinski Bucket in the scholarly literature at least since Richard Ettinghausen's foundational study of 1943, which is titled for the collector.

The Blacas Ewer is inscribed with the name of its maker, Shuja ibn Mana al-Mausili, and the British Museum's own production date reads April 1232, converted from Rajab 629 AH. The Baptistere de Saint Louis is signed six times by Muhammad ibn al-Zayn, an insistence unusual even within this genre, and carries no name of the ruler or patron who commissioned it. Between them these three objects name six medieval individuals, and the names by which all three are known are those of a French duke, a French king and a Russian count.

A name can be chronologically impossible

The Baptistere de Saint Louis cannot have belonged to Saint Louis, and the museum that holds it says so in the way it prints the title. The Louvre catalogues the object as Bassin dit Baptistere de Saint Louis, under inventory number LP 16, and dates it to the second quarter of the fourteenth century, 1325 to 1340. Louis IX died in 1270. The basin was made somewhere between fifty-five and seventy years after the king it is named for was dead.

The name attached for a reason that has nothing to do with ownership. The basin is first securely recorded in the French royal treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes around 1440, with no surviving explanation of how a Mamluk basin reached it, and from 1606 it was used to baptise French royal children, including the future Louis XIII, a role it kept on and off until 1856. A Mamluk brass basin acquired the name of a crusading French saint because of what the French monarchy later did with it.

What matters here is that the Louvre's dit is doing precise work and most citations drop it. The museum is not asserting that this is the Baptistery of Saint Louis; it is recording that the object is called that. A title that carries its own disclaimer in the institutional record loses the disclaimer the moment it is quoted, and the reader who meets the short form meets a claim the museum never made.

Sometimes the name commemorates the money

An object can be named for a fund rather than for anyone who ever owned it. The Cleveland Museum of Art's credit line for the Wade Cup reads Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, and the cup has been the Wade Cup in the literature ever since. Jeptha Homer Wade II never owned it. The name commemorates the endowment that paid, which is a form of donor recognition and not a fact of provenance at all.

The archive shows that this is not even applied consistently. The twelve-sided ewer with sphinxes at Cleveland accession 1945.27 was bought from the same J. H. Wade Fund, one year after the cup, and it is catalogued as the Twelve-sided Ewer with Sphinxes and Human-Headed Inscriptions. Same museum, same fund, same department, adjacent years, and one object carries the benefactor's name in its title while the other does not.

That inconsistency is the useful finding. If the presence of a personal name in a title were governed by a rule, it would carry information. It is not, so it does not. Whether an object is known by a collector's surname is a matter of which piece a curator or a scholar happened to single out, and it says nothing about the object's importance, its documentation or its ownership history.

A name that moved with the owner, and moved back

The clearest demonstration that these names track custody rather than the object is the Leonardo manuscript that changed its name twice in fourteen years. Thomas Coke, later first Earl of Leicester, acquired it in Italy in 1717, and it has been the Codex Leicester ever since. It remained in the family until 1980, when Armand Hammer bought it and it began to be called the Codex Hammer.

That second name was not informal. When the manuscript was sold again on 11 November 1994, the auction catalogue was published as The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer: the property of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California. A Christie's sale catalogue is a legal description of the lot on offer, and the lot on offer was named for the man who had owned it for fourteen years.

Bill Gates bought it at that sale, and the name reverted. When the Uffizi and the Museo Galileo showed the manuscript in Florence from 30 October 2018 to 20 January 2019, the exhibition was titled Water as Microscope of Nature: Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester. The object did not change. Its name was that of an eighteenth-century English earl, then that of a twentieth-century American industrialist, and then the earl's again, and at no point did any of this describe the notebook Leonardo wrote.

What to do with an owner-name in research

Keep the name and treat it as a provenance datum, because that is exactly what it is. A collector-name in a title is a dated pointer to a specific owner and a specific transfer, and it is often the earliest firm point in a modern ownership chain. Blacas tells you the object passed through a French ducal collection acquired in 1866; Bobrinski tells you it was in a Russian aristocratic collection before the Hermitage; Leicester tells you Holkham, 1717.

Then search under everything else as well. The maker's signature, the inscribed date, the place of manufacture, the patron and the recipient are all better search terms for the object itself, and for these three metalwork records they exist and are recorded. An object catalogue that indexes only the collector's surname is indexing the last owner who mattered to the institution, which is a different question from what the object is.

Finally, carry the museum's own hedging when you quote a name. Where a catalogue prints dit or known as or so-called, that qualifier is the museum declining to endorse the name, and it costs one word to keep.