Vasari Provenance Trust
Provenance seal
A seal that travels with a catalogued object for the rest of its life, and therefore had to survive handling, framing and a century of indifferent storage.
Vasari Provenance Trust 2024
Job file
- Institution
- Vasari Provenance Trust
- Document
- Provenance seal
- Year
- 2024
- Quantity
- 8,000
- Substrate
- Archive Wove 120gsm
- Sector
- Culture and heritage
The Trust catalogues works and issues a seal that stays with the object. That imposes an unusual constraint: the seal is not checked at a moment of transaction, it is checked at unpredictable intervals by people who may know nothing about it, decades apart.
We specified a latent image as the primary check, because it needs no equipment and no instruction — tilt it, and either the device appears or it does not. Reactive fibres in the stock give the Trust’s own registrars a second, faster check at the desk. A forensic marker in the ink settles the cases that reach a lawyer.
Ageing
The stock is a genuine archive wove, buffered and lignin-free, because a seal that outlasts its own paper is not a provenance record. Sample sheets from the run are held in the house archive under the same conditions the Trust uses, and are pulled and examined every five years.