“_La collection c’est l’homme_,” a well-known French lover of art and first-rate connoisseur used to say. Nowadays this transformation of Buffon’s threadbare saying is only partially true. It would, perhaps, be more correct to put it in the past tense, as a new type of virtuoso has arisen. A collector of the most recent brand prefers to buy collections “ready-made.” Such collections all gathered in good order in the houses of these new collectors speak very eloquently of the owner’s financial power, but say nothing of his taste, ability, or love for the artistically fine and beautiful. However, this being somewhat of a recent change brought about by casual circumstances with hardly any claim as an artistic phenomenon, this study can be confined for the present to that normal period, barely past, when the art and curio collector was really a “collector” and above all a lover of art as well as a passionate hunter after fine things. From the study of this semi-past world of art it will be easy to proceed to a comparative analysis of the up-to-date one, to the new species of collector who in no way comes under the definition “_La collection c’est l’homme_.” In the foregoing review of collectors and collections, it has mostly been a question of art collectors, with only incidental reference to other kinds of art lovers. Curios, however, imply many other things. The French word _curieux_, which has often been used for lack of a better expression, has a wider meaning. The word _curieux_, which might be translated by the English word “curious,” without losing much of its meaning, may have originated in the Latin _curiosis_, though it is doubtful whether the Romans ever applied this word to connoisseurs of art or other collectors. The fact that the artistic world was then divided into lovers of the beautiful and faddists or fools, that erudites had not yet appeared, may have rendered new words of definitions useless. When speaking of his friend Statius as a connoisseur and virtuoso, Pliny uses the Greek word φιλόαλος (friend of the beautiful), a word that might really be used to define the true and genuine collector. The French word _curieux_ appears for the first time in a dictionary by Robert Estienne (1531) and is defined _ung homme curieux d’avoir ou sçavoir choses antiques_ but later on, presumably from its probable Italian origin, the word acquires a wider sense, a sense that even finds an echo in Shakespeare, and so also the old meaning of _gentilezza_ as used by Lorenzo Medici has a resonance, according to Lacroix du Maine, in the French _gentillesses ou gentilles curiositez_. [Illustration: A CHILD. By Ferrante Zampini.] [Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI. By Ferrante Zampini.]