ABSTRACT
The desire to possess the past in the form of artefacts and to own relics which had metonymic relationships to stories about the past or about myth, were key characteristics of collectors who sought, as Krzysztof Pomian puts it, to hold in their hands the physical ties between 'the visible and the invisible worlds'. During the course of the eighteenth century, the 'merely curious' collector began to be disparaged in opposition to the 'connoisseur'. Curious collectors were attracted to objects either because they represented a world-view consonant with plenitude, or because the particular object had a significant connection to some kind of information, whether a myth or a scientific endeavour. The curious collector and the eccentric antiquarian were beginning to be socially and intellectually isolated in the nineteenth century. Hans von Aufsess as the hero of historical preservation is protecting not only his autonomy as a collector, but also his claim to interpret his collection as he chooses.
