PART I — THE CLASSICAL CHAIN

Before anything can be said about the new, the old must be given its due. For five centuries, the Western art world built a civilization of memory: ledgers, catalogues, connoisseurs, auction rooms — an immense apparatus devoted to one fragile task, keeping each work bound to the hand that made it. These three chapters are about that apparatus: how it arose, why authorship became the whole of value, and what the system of trust could and could not carry. I write about the classical chain with respect, because I am asking it to hand something over. You do not inherit from what you have not honored.