This collective comprises eight studies by seven authors who – interlacing the fields of art history, history and architecture, and based on eight case studies – tackle the question of how the decline of the nobility after mid-18th century and its abolition after the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy influenced their artistic patronage and collecting, and the transfers, reinterpretations and new uses of aristocratic artistic heritage. The contributions introduce new findings on renovations of castle, commissions of castle furnishings, architectural features of new country houses and their furnishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, collecting practices in the mid-18th and the early 19th century, their subsequent dispersal as well as their confiscations and musealisation. The studies significantly emphasise the borderline territories and exceed the Slovenian context, by taking as the point of origin the key global social and political historical events and circumstances between 1789 and 1945 and tackling their influence on aristocratic heritage in the wider European perspective.