Collecting and Access

Edited By: Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Gáldy, Adriana Turpin

£67.99

Collections reflect the passions of their owners, but how did people get to see them? This book investigates an understudied field: "access" to collections before public museums. The essays show there were diverse types of access that served a range of purposes.

Collections usually reflect the personal nature of collecting, sometimes indicating the intellectual interests and curiosity of their owners and in many cases their particular tastes…

Collections usually reflect the personal nature of collecting, sometimes indicating the intellectual interests and curiosity of their owners and in many cases their particular tastes and passions. Through the relationship between the collection and its space, whether physical or theoretical, the collection takes on more nuanced meanings than solely ambition and reputation, reflecting the varied meanings the collection had for its owner and increasingly for a wider public.
This new book is part of the Collecting Histories series and investigates an understudied field of research in the history of collecting. “Access” to collections is always taken for granted but the essays in this volume show that there were not only diverse types of access but that they also served a range of purposes. Before the advent of public museums, access to most collections was granted at the discretion of the collections’ owners, but in other examples, it was only possible vicariously in the form of collection catalogues or eye-witness accounts.

Susan Bracken, MA, PhD, FSA lectures regularly at the Victoria & Albert Museum, UK and elsewhere. Her research focuses on collecting in the seventeenth century, with particular emphasis on patrons and collectors of copies of Old Masters.

Andrea M. Gáldy, MA, PhD, FRHistS received post-doctoral fellowships from the Henry Moore Foundation, UK and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Italy. She teaches at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), Munich, Germany as a specialist in sixteenth-century collecting history with a focus on collections of antiquities and the Kunst- and Wunderkammer.

Adriana Turpin is head of research and teaches the history of collecting and art market studies for the International Department at Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts (IESA), Arts & Culture, Paris, France. She is on the Editorial board of the Journal of the History of Collections and Brill Studies in the History of Collecting and Art Markets.

Catherine Phillips, Isobel MacDonald, Orsolya Bubryák, Ulrike Müller, Anne Harbers, Stefania Ermidoro, Mary Malloy, Pawel Ignaczak, Anne Nellis Richter, Cecilia Riva, Virginie Spenlé, Stéphane Castelluccio