Value
A work is worth what is known of it. Archives, provenance, literature: the house establishes the text of a work as one establishes that of a classic — and entrusts it to the voices that carry authority.
Maison
Trivius
In Trivio · Lux
I · The name
Trivium — from the Latin tres viæ: the place where three roads meet. In the ancient world the crossroads was the place of the halt and of the exchange; one stopped there, one spoke, one dealt.
From trivium comes trivial: what passed through the crossroads was judged common. The house holds the opposite to be true. Everything passes through the crossroads — which is precisely why an eye is needed to tell things apart.
Three roads meet here: the work, the one who owns it, the one who awaits it.
The medieval schools called trivium the three arts of the word: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. The house works with words — it studies, it argues, it judges. And to these three arts it adds a fourth, which the schools did not teach: the art of keeping silent.
II · The three arts
Transmit
The house deals by private treaty, under mandate. No stock, no window, no auctions: one work, one owner, one right destination. Each passage is an act of reputation.
Silence
What is transmitted here is not shown. No works on this site, no names, no prices. The light belongs to the works; the silence, to the house.
“One should break silence only to say something that is worth more than the silence.”
Abbé Dinouart, L'Art de se taire, 1771
III · The house
Matteo Bernabei · Sophie Faro
Founders
From the gold ground to the monochrome: every school passes through the crossroads, one and the same eye judges them.
The house has neither walls nor stock: correspondents, archives, time.
IV · Correspondence
The house receives by appointment.
correspondance@maisontrivius.fr