The pri­va­te col­lec­tions were first called scrit­to­rio, stu­dio­lo or studio, and in tact with their diffusion during the se­ven­teenth cen­tu­ry, these ‘studies’, located in or close to the pri­va­te apartments, were reserved for mas­ter­piec­es, and the ‘gallery’ (galleria) became the room, which would house the basic col­lec­tion or substantiating material. Around the middle of the eighteenth cen­tu­ry, the Ve­ne­tian republic rea­lis­ed that the paintings in their possession, which were spread primarily between religious institutions, had through the centuries been sub­ject to dust, smoke from candles, through time, even damp, and were always hung in spaces with dramatic temperature chang­­es and were often sub­ject to at­tempts at re­sto­ra­tion, which in the best cases were clumsy, but were more often than not directly damaging.