Beyond "Art Collections": Owning and Accumulating Objects from Greek Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Concepts such as "art collection" and "art cabinet" and "cabinet of curiosities" are strongly embedded in the scholarly discourse of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They are based on the assumption that a form-based understanding of art has higher cultural value, that collections portray the "taste" and "passion" of their owners, and that art has no practical use. These terms were used in order to describe how objects were accumulated under very different cultural conditions long before the 18^...