A voracious curiosity about foreign places, goods, and people has become a defining characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. K.J.P. Lowe’s new book Provenance and Possession: Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy reveals that we must think differently about this defining feature—especially as it pertains to knowledge about and interest in Africa. Three sets of heretofore unknown documents—registers, account books, and correspondence—penned by scribes at the Ospedale Degli Innocenti in Florence and Italian agents working for the Estes, the Medici, and the papacy in Lisbon form the basis of this rigorous and field-changing book. To be sure, Provenance and Possession should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of collecting as well as the impact new geographical information and exotic goods and people had on Renaissance Europe.

Chapter one “Provenance and its Discontents” lucidly lays out the methodological stakes of this archivally driven study. By interrogating and explaining the processes by which the documents under discussion were generated, Lowe provides fresh and detailed historical context for the study of how Portuguese imperial expansion impacted Renaissance Italy. At the same time, Lowe demonstrates how to respect the limits of these archival traces because, as the author notes, even though our picture of this multifaceted cross-cultural encounter is becoming sharper and richer, it does not mean that the documents provide the kind of information that current scholarship desires. This is because twenty-first-century concerns—which are often ideologically driven—are far from the concerns of the historical actors under investigation. Lowe cogently argues the largest gulf lies between our current aspiration to know the provenance of the foreign goods Italian Renaissance collectors acquired and the collectors’ seemingly complete lack of knowledge or interest in where their most prized possessions came from. This point is of great consequence: if the Italian collectors did not know or care to know where their objects hailed from, how could these objects be used to vicariously colonize these locations?

Throughout the book, Lowe shows that most of the collectors under her scrutiny, such as Cosimo I de’Medici (1519–74) and Eleanora di Toledo (1522–62), did not value exotic objects because they signified their claim over far-off lands; they valued exotic objects because they were novel. Assessing what Renaissance Italians considered new and newsworthy information about the Portuguese overseas expansion is Lowe’s main objective in the second chapter. Chapter two, “The World Beyond Italy,” centers on the Estes and the Medici’s efforts to acquire and display new geographic information that was being brought back from Portuguese expeditions along the western coast of Africa. Through the careful study of archival miscellany, Lowe demonstrates that even though both the Estes and the Medici sought out charts, maps, globes, and clocks that portrayed and recorded new information about the Portuguese sea route to Africa as well as Africa’s coastline and inland geography, she discovered the same collectors had little to no interest in connecting newly encountered locations and people with the influx of goods from Africa that were arriving in Italy by way of Lisbon. Lowe also makes clear that in certain instances, it was the emulation of other European elites, such as Catherine of Austria (1507–1578) or Pope Julius II (1443–1513), which drove someone like Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) to acquire and display globes which conveyed this new information.

Chapter three, “Florence’s Black Babies,” shifts courtly households from the foreground of the analysis to the background. In it, Lowe takes up the language used to record and track black children as well as children with “mixed ancestry” that were in the care of the Ospedale Degli Innocenti in late fifteenth-century Florence. In doing so, Lowe painstakingly throws light on the lives of previously ignored or understudied people while at the same time circumscribing the parameters of whiteness. Remarkably, the registers, of the Opsedale often noted if a child in their care had dark skin but never associated skin color with Africa or with Portuguese imperial claims. Thus, “rather than being of African descent [the children in the care of the Opsedale] were still recognized as something new. They were both Florentine and black” (121).

Lowe sees a similar severing or erasure of provenance in the mid-sixteenth century with regard to ‘inanimate global goods” in Cosimo I de’Medici’s collection. Chapter four “Inanimate Global Goods,” is a revelatory chapter. Not only does it upend long-established theories about Cosimo’s acquisition of two famous Congolese Oliphants, it also details two account books that Lowe discovered in Florence’s Archivo di Stato in 2017. Meticulously compiled by Bastiano Campana (a Medici agent in Lisbon), the account books document important purchases of exotica that Campana made in Lisbon on Cosimo’s behalf. In addition to recording goods that were procured and destined for Cosimo’s collection, such as Mexican tortoiseshell fans as well as ancient coins and medals, Campana also noted prices of the objects. This is significant, as the cost paid for exotica is rarely recorded in inventories or letters—genres of documents art historians typically turn to when assessing early modern collections. In examining Campana’s accounts Lowe determines that what was valued most about these foreign objects was the rarity of their materials and their craftsmanship. Where these goods came from was either not known by Campana or it was not deemed worthy of note. Lowe also makes evident that Cosimo cared most about acquiring large quantities of goods, to either define himself as a part of a growing elite class of collectors or to outshine other collectors, it is not clear. This chapter, in particular, should be required reading for anyone working on the history of collecting as it makes crystal clear that the methods used by princely collectors to amass their collections were often not very methodical, and this carelessness often obliterated precisely the type of information art historians want to know—where exotic objects came from, how they ended up in European collections, and what meaning they acquired therein. Lowe shows us that, at least in the case of Cosimo’s collection, princely collections could be amassed impulsively and haphazardly.

People and animals that were captured by the Portuguese and sold to Italians are the topic of chapter five, “Living Global Goods.” As in the previous chapter, Lowe mines Campana’s account book. However, rather than inanimate goods, she uses Campana’s records to trace galley and domestic slaves as well as exotic animals that were purchased by the Medici court. Civet cats, parrots, and monkeys were among the animals bought to serve a range of purposes, from companionship and entertainment to the production of luxury products, such as perfume. Enslaved people too, Lowe found, could have very different purposes and status at the Medici court. Whereas a male galley slave may have legal status, his social status paled in comparison to female domestic slaves who served Eleanora di Toledo. Like the babies taken in by the Opsedale, skin color was always noted in court records, but as was the case with the registers of the Opsedale it is entirely unclear if dark skin was in any way linked to Africa or Portuguese imperialism.

The final chapter of the book poses the question: to what extent Portuguese imperialism contributed to new global sensibilities in Renaissance Italy? Instead of Florence, Lowe shifts her focus to Rome at the end of her study. Here a series of correspondence between Fabio Biondi, a papal agent stationed in Lisbon, and collectors in Rome form the basis of her analysis. By way of Biondi’s letters, Lowe ascertains that in the 1590s collectors in Rome sought out a limited range of global goods from Lisbon, and these goods had very specific functions, such as bezoar stones which had medicinal uses. Along with this more focused and purposeful consumerism, Lowe tracks the development and establishment of a friendship between Biondi and Antonio Vieria, an ambassador from Congo who was living and working in Lisbon. Biondi and Vieria’s relationship is an early and important instance of a friendship between a papal official and someone from Sub-Saharan Africa and suggests that in the case of high-ranking officials, skin color did not decrease one’s social status. Remarkably, however, this friendship did not result in any new knowledge sent back to Rome about Vieria’s native land.

In the end, Provenance and Possession: Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy teaches us that collectors in Florence and Rome were not driven to acquire goods because the goods came from a specific local group; nor did these collectors desire to have any political or colonial power over the foreign local people from which the goods hailed. What attracted collectors like Cosimo I to objects like ivory oliphants from Africa and feather fans from Mexico was their novelty, and a consequence of a longing to possess something radically new was the erasure of provenance.