ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Crown in the types of objects acquired and displayed in the home, so too did some court functionaries, artists, scholars and merchants. The inventories of Mai's collection, his correspondence, and the multiple dedications of texts to him by scholars in Italy and Spain evidence his fame as a man of learning and as a respected diplomat. The collections suggest that the motivations for collecting sculptures among men of erudition differed from those of artists, court officials or merchants. In sum, in the course of the late sixteenth and through the seventeenth centuries, some artists formed important collections of sculpture. It is not surprising, therefore, that a huge number of books are listed and many of them are Italian texts. Portraiture was the next most common type of sculpture collected, but mythological and other secular subjects are very rarely found in the documentation.
