To fill the voids of material absence, documentary sources – whether literary or archival – can provide a precious, if sometimes precarious, path to the reconstruction of what has been lost. The estate inventory, a recounting of a decedent's worldly goods, is a category of historical informant whose revelations can redefine how we think about objects, both their qualities and quantities. While pitfalls exist with using this type of record, including issues of translation and representative sampling, estate inventories can nonetheless provide unique opportunities for insight. In the following examination of Parisian painting around the year 1500, a sample of seventy-three inventories from 1480 to 1515 is deployed to redefine how we think about this visual art.

Depending on the definition, the study of painting in Paris at the turn of the sixteenth century is either characterised by a resplendent field of extant objects that can be found in libraries and museums across the globe, or a striking paucity of material, totalling less than twenty-five published works. In its broader classification, painting encompasses illuminated manuscripts and triumphs by proxy through the production of models and cartoons for tapestries and stained glass, and prints used to illustrate books. A more restricted definition of the painterly arts, where the medium is exclusively associated with works on panel and canvas, produces a much different picture, an emaciation of the object record that appears at odds with the artistic fecundity seen in other, allied arts.

Despite the efforts of scholars like Charles Sterling to redress this dearth, the number of paintings attributed to Paris remains conspicuously low, especially when compared with the veritable glut of contemporary Italian and Netherlandish works. Explanations for this disparity have varied. Some have seen the hand of iconoclasm, whether Huguenot or Revolutionary, in the lacunae. For large-scale altarpieces destined for the church, published excerpts from contemporary documents seem to confirm material devastation, and of the fifteen ecclesiastical commissions that can be found in the archives, almost all have been lost. Of this sample, even very large, multi-panelled works – of which, given their size, one might expect at least a small portion to remain – have been completely deleted from the record. Take, for example, an altarpiece made for the governors of the confraternity of St Vincent at the church of St Paul in 1507.