A book continuing the popular series “100 Great…” tells the story of how museum work began—how private collections gathered by passionate collectors and benefactors turned into great museum collections. It brings together material on museums both ancient and quite new, world-famous and not yet the most renowned. The reader will journey to the Acropolis of Athens and Pompeii, the Vatican and the Louvre, the Doge’s Palace and the Escorial, the Kunstkamera and Petrodvorets, the Hermitage and Russia’s Diamond Fund.
The book was published in 2002; since then, a lot of water has flowed… Iraq war and the looting of the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad—now events in Lebanon and Syria…