Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World

Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World offers a broad, yet detailed analysis of the phenomenon of collecting in the ancient world through a museological lens. In the last two decades this has provided a basis for exciting interdisciplinary explorations by archaeologists, art historians, and historians of the history of collecting. This compendium of essays by different specialists is the first general overview of the reasons why ancient civilizations from Archaic Greece to the Late Classical/Early Christian period amassed objects and displayed them together in public, private and imaginary contexts. It addresses the ranges of significance these proto-museological conditions gave to the objects both in sacred and secular settings.

Maia Wellington Gahtan, Ph.D. (Yale University, 1995) is Program Director, MA Museum Studies at the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici. She has published articles and books on museology and the interplay between intellectual history and the representational arts.

Donatella Pegazzano, Ph.D. (Università degli Studi di Roma e Firenze, 2000), professor at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, has published articles and books in the fields of the history of art and the history of collecting.

Contributors are: Sarah Bassett, Alexandra Bounia, Jas’ Elsner, Massimiliano Franci, Francesca Ghedini, Nathaniel Jones, Ann Kuttner, Alessandra Lazzeretti, Paolo Liverani, Ida Gilda Mastrorosa, Margaret M. Miles, Richard Neudecker, Evelyne Prioux, Giulia Salvo, Josephine Shaya and Lea Stirling.