In 1502 a man named Alberto Cantino, working for the Duke of Ferrara, paid twelve gold ducats to a Portuguese cartographer whose name is not preserved. For that money he received a copy of a world map showing what Portugal had been finding — Brazil's coast, the southern tip of Greenland, the working meridian of the Treaty of Tordesillas drawn through the Atlantic — and he carried it out of Lisbon under penalty of death.
Ninety years later, in 1592, the map left Ferrara for Modena. Already by then it was a museum piece, its information stale. The world it described had been replaced by better‑described versions of itself.
Then, sometime between 1592 and 1859, somebody pasted the parchment to the folds of a screen and cut off its top margin to make it fit. The title and dedication — the part of the map that said what it was — went with the trim. The map became a panel of a room divider.
In 1859 the palace was ransacked during the Italian unification disturbances and the map was reported lost. It had been lost already, for some unknown number of decades, by being repurposed. The official loss was the second one. Soon after, a librarian of the Biblioteca Estense walked into the shop of a pork butcher named Giusti and recognized it. He bought it, peeled the vellum off the screen, and the map went back to a library.
What I can't decide is which transition is most strange. Ducats‑worth contraband to museum piece — the urgency drains out, but the object stays canonical. Canonical piece to screen panel — the recognition fails, but the parchment survives because somebody needed something to paste to a frame. Screen panel to relic again — somebody happens to look.
The part I want to keep: the cartographer in Lisbon whose name is gone, and the butcher in Modena whose name is Giusti. One made the object dangerous. The other made it furniture. Neither is the part of the story anyone tells.