©Cueto Illera, Juan Antonio
ABSTRACT: Collecting is an activity that differs from a collection of items, wherein the accumulation of objetcs occurs in the collecting has a specific purpose whatever. Moreover, the collector responds to another profile as a selfless person looking for a personal gain in the cultural, social, and economic status.
Although collecting historical origins are as ancient Greece and a continuity in the history, the origins of the modern collecting are in the new medieval society born after the fourteenth century´s crisis, and having the peak with the appearance of humanism, when returning the artistic, scientific and cultural classicism extends patronage activity and in which the collection activity happens to have a scientific and educational purpose. This reveals new spaces dedicated to knowledge and at the same time serve to explain the basis of the collections, as studiolos or wunderkammer or wonder chambers in the XVI century.
During the seventeenth century is going to be a change in the dynamics of the collections, and will impose increasingly painting. This phenomenon will spread through Europe from Flanders and begin to proliferate the concept of the art gallery as a model of ostentation among the various European monarchies and the nobility get to imitate them, therefore, is at this time when you start to fully develop a market artistic pictorial pieces of different quality, even for the lower social classes.
These characteristic are apply to the Spanish collecting, which begins to develop with Charles V, although with Philip II occurs when the collecting boom in Spain with an organization of the artistic very similar to the European chambers of wonder, and Philip IV when Spanish hegemony occurs in European painting galleries, getting constantly nobility imitated them in collections. We have so many different cases, such as the Marquis of Carpio or the Condestables of Castile, who imitated the collecting activities of the monarchy; and used their positions as diplomats of the monarchy, to improve their own collections and the collections of the monarchy.
