On June 29, 1574, two days after Vasari's death, the Libro was given by his heirs to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco I, who had sent for it. It then disappeared. The great collectors and connoisseurs of the 17th and 18th centuries all dreamed of acquiring and believed they possessed drawings of the Libro. The most famous of them all, Pierre-Jean Mariette, was at the source of a historiographic tradition that saw in a certain type of ornamental and architectural montage the sign of a sheet's past belonging to the mythical Vasarian collection. But we know, since 1950, when two great scholars, Arthur Popham and Philip Pouncey, noticed the presence of a mysterious emblem on a "Vasari montage", that things are not so simple.

This exhibition is devoted to the unexpected consequences of this discovery, which is more than half a century old.