Ancient inscriptions, series numbers, the marks of old rubber stamps or labels: in a “Museum of Discoveries”, it is necessary to look for clues inscribed on the objects themselves, or to follow the trail of fragments of news contained in the old ledgers used for records and inventories. Yet this is how our basic knowledge is built up about the history of a piece or a group of pieces, before we begin to interpret and study them in greater depth.

This set of drawings, belonging to the museum collection, was recently identified as a series in which their author, Cyrillo Volkmar Machado, illustrated the first 18 fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.