ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two digital projects such as Mapping Titian and Mapping Paintings, that visualize through geographic mapping the stories that have been trapped within lists of people and places in provenance records. The nature of provenance data makes it an easy fit for geographic mapping over time. The term “provenance,” which was first used in relation to artworks in the mid-eighteenth century, means to “come from.” Geographic mapping of provenance data carries over this foregrounding of time and place at the expense of pedigree and, in the process, offers a different perspective on known information and highlights archival incompleteness. Venice remained an important home to collections, totaling almost forty in the lagoon in 1700, but the migration of so many important sixteenth-century artworks to locations outside Venice created an impossible demand in the following century for original sixteenth-century pictures.
