Beger’s Thesaurus is enriched with gems; it is a chosen corpus, selected and ordered according to a coherent classification of material. Beger himself, a few years later, will publish the Thesaurus Brandenburgicus selectus, in which he illustrates, with commentary in dialogue form, the collection of the Elector of Brandenburg, antiquities that are much more varied: coins, gems, small bronzes, statues (fig. 3). Although not in the title, but only in the preliminary pages, the museum is in any case defined, once again, a thesaurus. [7] Compared to Latini, Goltzius, and Patin himself, then, Beger leads us to an illustrated, composite, explained, and ordered thesaurus, but one whose boundaries coincide with those of a museum, a collection. Antiquarian thesauri, however, are not merely illustrated catalogs of collections, as prestigious as they might be – they cross their boundaries and characteristics.

The contents of this thesaurus are composite: they are hieroglyphs (but not only) taken from obelisks, statuettes, canopic jars, etc. of very diverse provenance (objects in private collections, monuments, prints, etc.), and the meaning of the collection is clear: to bring it all together in one ‘place’, to provide a comprehensive compendium. And this is an early example of something that will evolve over time and that corresponds to the fundamental idea of an antiquarian thesaurus.

Also de la Chausse’s Romanum Museum reflects the idea of a museum, because like the Museo Cartaceo it is a museum of museums: it brings together a fine selection of antiquities, substantially small in size, annotated and divided by theme and typology. They are drawn from the most important collections in Rome, pointedly indicated, and from a few drawings. But it is more than a museum. The full title is Romanum Museum, sive thesaurus eruditae antiquitatis: in an alternative space, in a ‘virtual museum’ an original and organized set of objects is collected. [8] A thesaurus selectus like Beger’s, enclosed not by the walls of a museum, but by the boundaries of the city of Rome.

These monumental thesauri are a collection of previously edited treatises on every aspect of ancient civilization and, with some differences between them, selected and arranged thematically. They are composed according to the perspective that was most familiar to their authors, namely the edition of texts, so they no longer deal with antiquities and their images: instead, the antiquitates are those of Marcus Terentius Varro, the ancient civilization, not monuments. Precedence is given to the books, reproduced in full and if necessary translated into Latin in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. Thus, the idea of a ‘paper museum’ is also surpassed in function of a comprehensive analysis of the ancient world, carried out through the texts of a community of scholars from the past and present, and from different geographical origins.

Graevius and Gronovius set a standard of rigor and comprehensiveness that will forever bind to the word thesaurus, surpassing any previous work: anyone who publishes a work with that title will be confronted with them. An example is Ludovico Antonio Muratori, author of a four-volume epigraphic collection entitled Novus Thesaurus veterum inscriptionum in praecipuis earumdem collectionibus hactenus praetermissarum (1739–1742). To put it in Michail Chatzidakis’ words:

The choice of the term thesaurus in the title, hitherto used only in the Thesauri of Gronovius and Graevius (who, however, did not deal specifically with epigraphy, but with all areas of ancient cultures), betrays its author’s ambitious intention of wanting to set new standards within the discipline of epigraphy;
[...] in the era of the systematization of antiquarian knowledge [...] in his attempt to surpass his predecessors by presenting as complete a collection of inscriptions as possible, [Muratori] aspired to compose an edition that followed the rules of philological textual criticism, as evidenced by his numerous interventions in the editions of his predecessors, aimed at improving their allegedly ‘corrupt’ texts. [12]

A flaw? Bernard de Montfaucon, in the preface to his L’Antiquité expliquée (1719, 10 volumes and 1724, 5 supplements) acknowledges that the two authors have brought together everything that a person would struggle to find in a lifetime. But then, once faced with those 36 volumes (including supplements), how can one not become demotivated? Moreover, the thesauri include works often with conflicting theses, so how to orient oneself? [13] Montfaucon's concerns are twofold: an excessive bulkiness of the volumes, and the lack of selection, criticism and, fundamentally, usability. This is why Montfaucon, himself an editor of texts, makes a different choice: he collects everything that can be illustrated by images, and thus leaves aside topics such as laws or geography (well represented in the thesauri), because they cannot be depicted. He also selects useful images, reorganizes them into an original classificatory scheme, and accompanies them with a critical text.

Montfaucon really does reduce a large amount of information into a space he defines and organizes. For what we have said so far, L’Antiquité expliquée is a thesaurus, perhaps the most thesaurus of the thesauri, but if a thesaurus is a repertory to draw on when needed, Montfaucon conceived his work instead as a real course of study (of two years), to be read from beginning to end. It is not a thesaurus and thus from its title marks even more clearly the distance from its predecessors.