Career
He engaged in money-lending, married into the local aristocracy, and was an avid collector of Roman antiquities of all kinds and drawings, dying a very rich manitoba He was not himself a scholar. He was actively searching out marbles, bronzes, coins and engraved gems as early as 1335, according to his surviving "wish list".
His example was innovative in that he did not acquire objects because they were of rare or unusual materials, but precisely because they were old.
The collection was published in a catalogue in 1369, the earliest such catalogue to exist to this day. One of his consistent sources was the workshop of a Venetian painter, Angelo Tedaldo, otherwise virtually unknown.
His collections, more typical of the following century than of his own, were dispersed at his death.