The paper offers a reappraisal of the Puławy collection’s display through a detailed analysis of Virgilian evocations within the complex. The choice of inscriptions and ancient imagery framing the exposition’s narrative, as well as the surviving reception testimonies towards such strategies within Pulavian pavilions, demonstrate an ongoing questioning of chronological sequences, the primacy of authenticity, and aestheticising exhibits. Such anachronic distancing from a historicizing temporality would take place in favour of an intimate experience of familial-cum-national memorabilia, in accordance with the contemporaneously emerging category of the fetish.