ABSTRACT
As a ship in the middle of the ocean must navigate without seeing the shore, so to must art historians working with archival documents about lost objects try find their way back to the material without necessarily having tangible things in front of them. While exceptions can be found, particularly with records that track the possessions of the nobility or artworks owned by the church, typically it is only through textual records that we know an item from the past even existed, as the documented objects are usually long gone. Some of these lost things revealed by the archives, moreover, can lead us deeper into the difficult waters of material sourcing and stylistic approaches, particularly when said document is from a context of making, like the workshop/atelier. Such is the case with an estate inventory from a Parisian artisan who worked in ivory, bone, and precious woods at the beginning of the sixteenth century, that of one Chicart Bailly. Out of the record of his workshop, objects appear that not only lead us across oceans but also into the often-tangled web of stylistic definitions in the early modern period.
