* This note came about because of a series of happy circumstances, and I thank three friends for its completion : Lucy Shoe Meriti who taught her students " that scholarship sometimes means finding out more and more about less and less - do not give up before finding an answer which satisfies"; Paola Pelagatti who publicly lauded the virtues of inventory numbers at the recent 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici held in Florence ; and Francesco Nicosia who, at the same celebrations, stated that Museums should be open to a public which questions and seeks answers. The combination of these three affirmations allowed me to place Valentino's piglet in its proper historical setting.

The ancient bronze will not be discussed simply as a find ; rather, I use it as an example of how one archaeological object was treated during various periods of the 18th and 19th centuries in Tuscany.

This paper was delivered as a public lecture at the Istituto di Norvegia in Rome on April 22, 1983. I thank Professor Hjalmar Torp and Dr. J. Rasmus Brandt, Director and Vice-Director of the Institute, for their kind invitation and hospitality.

Following the advice of Paola Peruzzi of the Archivio di Stato, Florence, to whom I am especially thankful for introducing me to the intricacies of archival work, I have written out most of the 18th century abbreviations; suppressed letters are between parentheses. The few corrections are in brackets. The 18th century usage for capital letters is not followed. February 14, 1983. Florence.

POSTSCRIPT : After its completion in 1983, this article was quoted by Phillips and others as "Piglet" or "Valentino's Piglet". Unfortunately it did not appear in print before the author's death in 1988. Thanks to the help and encouragement of his widow, Millicent W. Phillips, Kyle M. Phillips, III, and Françoise-Hélène Massa Pairault, I have made the changes and corrections necessary for the article to appear in MEFRA. The text of the documents quoted has been left unchanged since it is based on Phillips' own reading of the originals. As reflected by many articles and books published in the last few years, the interest in rediscovering the excavation and museum history of ancient artifacts has grown rapidly. In order to stay as closely as possible within Phillips' scope of this article, I have included only a few additional references in his footnotes, marked with brackets. I thank