A Venetian provenance

Provenance is a discreet word for a noisy thing. It says: this object was somewhere once, and is somewhere else now, and the reason for the difference is a story we have agreed not to tell loudly.

The reliquary at the centre of The Empress's Wake is invented. The provenance arrangements that surround it are not. I want to say a little, in this letter, about how that part of the book was put together — not because the bibliography is interesting, but because I have come to believe that a provenance is one of the more truthful documents a country can produce about itself.

A provenance, properly written, lists every owner an object has had, every transaction it has been part of, every collection it has briefly graced and every collection it was quietly returned from. It is, in effect, a ledger of who has been allowed to feel that the object belonged to them. That is a more interesting question than whether the object is genuine.

Almost everything a museum has is genuine. The interesting question is whose it is genuine for.

In Venice, a provenance is also a piece of municipal architecture. The Marciana has them. The Cini has them. The Querini Stampalia keeps them with a thoroughness that borders on the affectionate. There is, in those collections, a feeling I have only otherwise encountered in old parish registers — the feeling that the institution intends to outlive the dispute. A provenance written in 1812 will, with luck, still be there in 2112, available to anyone who comes asking with a pencil and a query.

The Empress's reliquary, as I conceived it for the novel, is a small silver casket of late twelfth-century Constantinopolitan workmanship. It is given by a Byzantine empress to a Venetian doge in 1204, which is to say it is not given so much as taken. It surfaces in a Venetian sacristy in 1487 with a Latin inscription that contradicts the Greek one beneath it. It vanishes from the sacristy in 1797. It reappears in a private collection in Trieste in 1843 with a new inscription in Italian that contradicts both the Greek and the Latin. It is purchased by an English baronet in 1879 and recorded — though not, I think, accurately — in the catalogue of his library in Herefordshire. And then, in the 1994 monograph that nobody in England wants found, it is footnoted.

That is the provenance. I am proud of it, in the small and unflattering way one is proud of a thing one has invented. None of the steps of it are invented. Every move I have given that fictional reliquary is a move some real object once made. The 1204 sack is real. Venetian sacristies were rearranged in the 1790s. Triestine collections of the 1840s did sometimes acquire objects whose inscriptions did not match. The English baronet is composite — there were perhaps three of him — but the inaccurate library catalogue is well-attested. And there really was a 1994 monograph on Mediterranean monasticism, written by a scholar who, when I attempted recently to locate her, was no longer answering her telephone.

This is the rule I have given myself: the artefact may be fictional, but its provenance must be plausible. Every museum I have invented could have been a real one. Every transaction must have a real-world cousin. Otherwise the footnotes do not work, and the footnotes are the whole point.

Martha Bancroft is, in the novel, the third person to have read note 17 of the 1994 monograph. The first reader was the author. The second was the person who made it her life's work to ensure no one else found it. Martha is the third. And she is, in the way of all readers who arrive third, the one who finally makes the difference.

If you have read The Empress's Wake, you know what she does with the difference. If you have not, the Mediterranean is waiting, and the footnotes are still there.

I have other footnotes. — C.H.