We all, in one way or another, are collectors. The focus of each person's collecting may be anything from a type of object to a group of ideas. The objects may be rarities as well as oddities. Styles of collecting have changed as individual and group tastes have evolved.

As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance, sixteenth and seventeenth century collecting emerged into organized princely and philosophic pastimes. In Italy, Antoine Giganti (1535-98), Secretary to Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti from l580 until his death in 1597, and Monsignor Beccadelli were great collectors of antiquities. Giganti and Ulisse Aldovandi both had their own museums in Bologna, a great center for learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Germany the collection of Archduke Ferdinand II was amassed at Schloss Ambras in l564-73. He collected arms and armor and was the first to designate the Kunstkammer or Art Room which had eighteen cupboards along the back walls and two free standing cases. . There was also the Brandenburg Kunstkammer in Berlin.

In England, Horace Walpole used the epithet "the father of Vertu in England" to describe Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1636). Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) collected Roman antiquities... read more