From the Market to the Museum: Nineteenth-Century Circulation, Display, and Scholarly Study of Mesoamerican Artifacts in Italy and Beyond

The study of objects’ biographies, especially when dealing with centuries- long biographical trajectories, reveals how circulation patterns change over time, often mirroring the transformations of the wider sociocultural contexts in which things move. In this chapter, after briefly synthesizing the main circulation trends that marked the first three centuries of the biographies of a selected corpus of Mesoamerican artifacts, I will look to a specific phase of their collection history in more detail. Coinciding with the nineteenth century, this phase was marked by radical shifts in circulation patterns, modes of display, and scholarly scrutiny. Due to rapidly changing political landscapes in Europe and the resulting socioeconomic crisis suffered by Italian noble families, objects that for centuries had been circulated as gifts and preserved in private collections entered the antiquities market through art dealers and auction houses, ultimately ending up in museums in Italy and other European countries. The new museal displays made the artifacts available to scholars mostly working as museum curators and university professors. Their investigations provided the epistemological framework for the artifacts’ museal displays and stimulated a new awareness of the pieces’ economic and cultural values for other private collectors who, in turn, were further induced to sell their collections. As an outcome of these circular processes around the end of the nineteenth century, the corpus of artifacts studied herein was firmly in the possession of those museums that still house them today.