Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, C. 1500¿1750

Book excerpt: Prints and drawings have been keenly collected in Europe since at least the early sixteenth century. Relatively modest in price, they offered artists, amateurs and collectors of a systematic turn of mind the opportunity to put together holdings with a wide representation of different hands, schools and types of subject. Prints and drawings are traditionally treated separately, but their collecting is shown here to raise many interrelated issues. Employing a wide range of methodologies, the essays in this volume offer a number of innovative investigations into the collecting, perception, classication and display of works on paper.