The first two private collectors we know about appeared in Venice at the end of the fourteenth century. In the beginning of the fifteenth century there were at least six Venetian collectors, two of which lived on Crete. At that time, this number was only exceeded in Europe by Florence where we now know that eleven collectors had resided. There was then a sharp rise in the number of private collectors in Italy and the rest of Europe, and the aristocratic, the ecclesiastical as well as the bourgeois world in Europe came to be speckled with these ‘curiosos’, ‘antiquarios’ or ‘connaisseurs’, as the collections were called during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century.