The work is of wood, marked with many images, and full of little boxes; there are various orders and grades in it. He gives a place to each individual figure and ornament, and he showed me such a mass of papers that, though I always thought that Cicero was the fountain of richest eloquence, scarcely would I have thought that one author could contain so much or that so many volumes could be pieced together out of his writings. I wrote to you before the name of the author who is called Julius Camillus. He stammers badly and speaks Latin with difficulty, excusing himself with the pretext that through continually using his pen he has nearly lost the use of speech … He calls this theatre of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind … and now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre.
Erasmus, Epistolae1
Viglius Zuichemus, who was writing this so breathlessly to his great correspondent Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1532, had just been shown one of the most famous edifices of the Renaissance, a structure talked about by intellectuals in France, Italy and beyond: Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory.
The structure itself did not survive for much more than a few decades and only fragmentary descriptions of it are preserved. With so suspiciously few sources to go on, and in view of its creator’s reputation for being a charlatan, some scholars even believe that it may never have existed, though honourable witnesses like Viglius seem to vouch for the fact that it was indeed more than a scholar’s outrageous fantasy.
Camillo was clearly a man obsessed. Little is known about the precise circumstances of his life, but he seems to have given up a professorship in Bologna in order to devote himself entirely to his idée fixe, the theatre, the culmination, or so he thought, of two thousand years’ worth of theories about memory, rhetoric, occult knowledge and the proper method of thought. His reputation had preceded him. ‘They say that this man has constructed a certain Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero,’2 Viglius had reported to Erasmus some weeks earlier, and had continued to give a rough idea of the workings of this wondrous machine: ‘It is said that this Architect has drawn up in certain places whatever about anything is found in Cicero … Certain orders or grades of figures are disposed … with stupendous labour and divine skill.’
The scholar, Camillo, was working on his greatest work, a kind of grand unified theory of memory and companion encyclopaedia to the theatre itself, which, he hoped, would revolutionize the way people thought about the world and how they utilized their thought in discourse. The King of France, Francis I, was intrigued by this idea and sent for the Italian magus, promising him the grand sum of 1,500 ducats if he brought his theatre to Paris with him and assembled it there without showing it to anyone but the king himself. Camillo set off on the laborious journey from Bologna to Paris, made more difficult by the fact that he was cursed with a terrible stammer and spoke little Latin and French probably not at all; his great treasure packed and crated up and brought to the coast by ox cart, from there to a French harbour by cog and the entire breadth of France by cart again, an agonizing period during which his life’s work, his theatre, manuscripts, drawings, ornaments, symbols, utensils and books were in danger of being damaged, lost, spoiled by rain, stolen by vagrants or robbed by outlaws every step of the way.
He did finally reach the French court and settled there around 1534 after another trip to Italy to pick up some things left behind. Now he set about constructing, or reconstructing, the great theatre for his new and powerful patron, the king himself, all under the ever-watchful eye of a court starving for gossip and of scholars eager to find out about this miraculous engine of the mind.3 What we know about the building that took shape in some courtyard of the royal court is gleaned from Camillo’s own description in his Idea del Theatro, a mere shadow of the magnum opus he hoped to write but never did, a little book which appeared after his death.
The historian Frances Yates has attempted to reconstruct the interior of the building. The first thing Francis I would have realized was that it was he who was standing on stage and looking into the auditorium, instead of taking his customary place among the audience. The panorama presented to him was a seven-tier amphitheatre divided into seven segments, each fronted by one of the seven pillars of wisdom that were supposed to have stood in Solomon’s temple. The galleries, however, which surrounded the stage in a semi-circle, were not peopled by expensively clad courtiers and ladies in low-cut dresses out for an evening’s dinner and entertainment, but by symbols, trapdoors and inscriptions, all of which formed a metaphorical order of the world.
Each of the seven segments was allocated to one of the seven planets (from left to right: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), while the ascending tiers had a symbolic system all of their own. The first tier, that closest to the stage, was given over to the Planet, the second was called the Banquet, signifying the first and simplest stage of Creation. From there the order ascended to the Cave, Gorgon and her Sisters, Pasiphe and the Bull, the Sandals of Mercury and, finally, Prometheus, all decorated with the appropriate allegories and symbolism and supplemented with trapdoors behind which the inquiring mind would find the appropriate glosses on Cicero’s writings, prepared by Camillo himself.
The star of this theatre was the human mind, or, more precisely, memory. The structure was nothing more or less than a mnemonic system, Camillo would have explained to the astounded monarch, allowing him to visualize everything on earth and put it into its appropriate place in the symbolic order of the world, to be retrieved at the appropriate moment during a debate or long oration, the most elaborate memory aid ever constructed. If the king, for instance, wanted to discourse about himself as a patron of the arts and sciences, he would find them on the highest realm, given over to human activities, Prometheus. Here, in the Saturnian segment to his right, he would see right under the wooden roof a figure of Cybele looking down on him, the allegory of the arts of the Saturnian, earth-related matters: geometry, geography and agriculture. If his mind was inclined to loftier things, he could look right ahead at the Apollonian segment dedicated to the sun, where the Promethean tier showed, among other figures, Apollo and the Muses, signifying the art of poetry. Everything, every emotion, every activity, was localized in this contraption that was, in effect, a collection of possibilities as well as a gigantic memory aid.
Francis would have found his troubled campaigns against the Habsburg Emperor Charles V in the column of Mars, where he could see the Planet’s influence asserting itself throughout Creation: as a pure principle on the lower rung, allied only with its cabbalistic principle of Sephira; then, on the Banquet level, as earthly volcanic power and spiritual Purgatory; as mixed element representing vigour but also discord on the level of the Cave; then as intellectual influence on the fourth level, Gorgon and her Sisters, where it stood for hasty and rash decisions; as human nature in Pasiphe and the Bull, arrogance and pride; ascending to the Sandals of Mercury, where it became a human action, striking fire and being cruel; to the highest level, Prometheus, the human arts and the art of the smith, of the military and of the butcher.
The king, wishing to remind himself of victorious battles, could have chosen the two fighting Serpents on this level as symbols of the arts of combat, though the terrifying Furies close to them would have brought to his mind the flip side of glory on the battlefield, which he had also experienced at first hand: prisons, tortures and punishment. The Serpents and the Furies, therefore, could have summed up his martial career, while the items in the compartment of the Apollonian Prometheus would have reminded him of his goals: the Clock and the Lion for good government, Apollo as Shepherd, the pastoral art. From the Serpents to the Clock and Lion and from the Furies to the divine Shepherd, Francis could have given a speech on the virtues of a ruler there and then, aided by the images in front of him, which he had thus associated with events and aspirations of his own life.
It is not certain that Francis I ever saw the theatre, as it is not certain that it was ever finished. We do know that Giulio Camillo left France after a while; the king had obviously grown bored with the Italian stammerer and had extended the hand of patronage to another artist and philosopher. Camillo had received only 500 ducats, a third of the promised sum, and had been forced, after the money had been used up paying for building material, copyists and artists, to admit to himself that he would not be able to finish his work there. He seems to have left it behind in Paris, possibly altogether despairing of ever scraping together the funds to realize his ambition. There is an uncertain sighting of the theatre at court in the 1550s, but when a scholar investigated its existence half a century later he could find no trace of it anywhere.
Camillo’s elaborate Theatre of Memory stands in a long tradition of thinking on the art of memory, on its power, conception and shape. Legend has it that the art was born when the pre-Socratic poet, Simonides of Ceos, survived a disaster during which all the guests at a banquet had been killed by a collapsing ceiling and were so badly disfigured that even their relatives could not identify them. Remembering the places at which they had sat at table, Simonides was able to put names to the corpses and to help the mourners. It occurred to him that this feat of memory had been possible only because he had associated each banquet guest with a locality, and he began to experiment with similarly localizing abstract ideas. He could, for instance, place imaginary objects with symbolic qualities in a house he envisioned or along a path, and then pick them up one by one, spinning on the thread of thought aided by these symbols without the need of written notes.
The account of Simonides and his momentous discovery is relayed by Cicero, the most famous exponent of the art of memory i n antiquity. Another Roman writer, Quintilian, illustrates the method. To use it to best effect, he writes, the orator should choose
… a spacious house divided into a number of rooms. Everything of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind, in order that thought may be able to run through all the parts without let or hindrance. The first task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in running through these, for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory. Then what has been written down or thought of, is noted by a sign to remind of it. This sign may be drawn from a whole ‘thing’, as navigation or warfare, or from some ‘word’; for what is slipping from memory is recovered by the admonition of a single ‘word’ … These signs are then arranged as follows. The first notion is placed, as it were, in the forecourt; the second, let us say in the atrium, the remainder are placed in order all round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlors but even to statues and the like. This done, when it is required to revive the memory, one begins from the first place to run through all, demanding what has been entrusted to them of which one will be reminded by the image … What I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or in going through a city with pictures. Or we can imagine such places for ourselves. We require, therefore places, either real or imaginary, and images and simulacra which must be invented. Images are as words by which we note the things we have to learn, so that as Cicero says, ‘we use places as wax and images as letters’.4
These places for memorization and with them the theory of artificial memory were developed further during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas both analysed and propagated this method as a useful way of learning by heart legal, devotional and philosophical texts. Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Spanish mystic and philosopher, whose Hermetic thought so influenced alchemists all over Europe and especially in Rudolf’s Prague, introduced a more dynamic system of memory based on divine attributes, a neo-Platonist reinterpretation of the art in which the human intellect was encouraged to imitate the divine. In the Renaissance a whole flood of treatises and larger works dealt with the art of memory and its applications in philosophy, in the cabbala as understood by Christian scholars, in natural magic and in alchemy. Giordano Bruno even transformed the art into a fully-fledged occult system of knowledge, a process of initiation into the mysteries of God’s own creative power.5
The English Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd had developed a theatre of memory of his own accord, which he outlined in his 1619 work Utrisque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (a title that to modern ears sounds inescapably Borghesian).
Fludd’s theatre, possibly inspired by stories about Camillo he had picked up while in France and modelled on Shakespeare’s Globe (the engraving in his work is ambivalently labelled Theatrum Orbi – ‘World’ or ‘Globe Theatre’),6 fused the mystical ideas of Bruno with an arrangement similar to that of Camillo’s legendary but long destroyed construction. To Fludd, however, the mystical number of memory and of universal order appears to have been five, not seven, and the theatre was divided into fives. Later other writers, such as John Willis, followed Fludd and drafted theatres of memories of their own.7
The dramatization of memory and the cultivation of imaginary museums seems to have taken hold of a small but significant part of English culture in the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon, himself much exercised by the nature of memory, designed an ideal collection all of his own, a perfect island in the middle of nowhere, a utopia. The imaginary travellers he sent on a voyage in his The New Atlantis reach an isle inhabited by a race of wise people whose governor, the Father of Solomon’s House, a wonderfully oriental potentate-cum-initiate in richly decorated robes, explains the purpose and organization of his great and sophisticated civilization. ‘The end of our foundation,’ he relates, ‘is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ He proceeds to describe the foundation in its various parts. There are automatons, designed to further
… the knowledge of the Causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to be effecting of all things possible … We have divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return, and perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures, but images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents. We have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness and subtlety.8
It is a great and wonderful display that the New Atlantians have put on for their entertainment and edification. There are ‘houses of deceits of the senses’ with optical and other illusions, and
… two very long and fair galleries: in one of these we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions: in the other we place the statues of all principal inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the inventor of ships: your monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder: the inventor of music: the inventor of letters: the inventor of printing: the inventor of observations of astronomy: the inventor of works in metal: the inventor of glass: the inventor of silk of the worm: the inventor of wine: the inventor of corn and bread: the inventor of sugars: and all these, by more certain tradition than you have.9
Apart from these galleries devoted to the founders of wisdom, there are ‘parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds which we use not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissections and trials’, health chambers, orchards and gardens, furnaces and laboratories, perspective houses, treasuries, and engine houses ‘where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions’.10
What the travellers are shown on this mysterious island is, in fact, an alchemist’s perfect chamber of miracles, complete with galleries, laboratories, menageries and botanical gardens, an otherworldly version of Rudolf’s laird in Hradčany Castle. Bacon attached great importance to such ‘goodly large cabinet[s], wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art of engine hath made is rare in stuff, form, or motion; whatsoever singularity chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever nature hath wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included’.11 They were instruments of knowledge, covering not only
… nature, free and at large (when she is left to her own and does her work her own way), – such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals, – but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded. Therefore I set down at length all experiments of the mechanical arts, of the operative part of the liberal arts, of the many crafts which are not yet grown into arts properly so called … seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.12
Imaginary collections are as important as real ones: both place on their stage memories as contained in objects; both seek to lock out death by building fortresses of remembrance and permanence. Little more than a century after Bacon’s earnest exposition of the perfect Wunderkammer the auctioneer Thomas Ballerd, ‘bookseller at the rising-sun in little-Britain’, prepared a sale catalogue which sought to attract the attention of connoisseurs with
… many very Valuable and Uncommon Books, in most Faculties and Languages, Chiefly in PHYSIC, CHURURGERY, CHYMISTRY, DIVINITY, PHILOLOGY, HISTORY, and other Polite Parts of Learning. Most of the Classics: Not. Varior. Old Elzevier’s and other Choice Editions, well Bound, and very Fair. Also BOOKS of SCULPTURE & PAINTING, with Choice Manuscripts. WHICH Will begin to be sold by AUCTION, at the Black-boy Coffee-house in Ave-Mary-Lane, near Ludgate, on MONDAY the 8th Day of January, 17 10/11, beginning every Evening at Four of the Clock, till the Sale is finish’d.13
He was auctioning off the collection and library of the late Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), who had, in his early career, made use of the mnemonic systems that were so fashionable until the middle of the seventeenth century. In the middle of his career, however, Browne saw a new problem that was transforming attitudes to knowledge and to memory, and with it attitudes to the nature and ideal of collecting: in a world that seemed to be constantly expanding it was no longer possible to possess a mind of truly universal scope, to encompass all that was to be known in one head, one library or in one cabinet. Specialization was required. ‘Knowledge is made by oblivion, and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much we know.’14
The ars memoria as a tool for understanding the world and its hidden harmonies had to admit defeat in the face of what Louis MacNiece would later call the world’s tendency for being ‘incorrigibly plural’. Browne found that memory alone was not enough to stem the tide of forgetting:
Memory slips away, age, time, events pass mostly into oblivion; commentaries therefore must be made ready in good time to obviate so great an evil. Not to rearrange the thoughts of writers in commonplace books, which will be doing again what has been done, but from a fresh reading of books to set down an abstract in free style, to include all that is difficult and worthy of note; whatever the author himself, the memory of like things, or natural genius supplies.15
His consolation against thoughts of mortality and his impending role as food for worms was a warm adherence to the minutiae of life, a love of particulars, as he himself explained:
I hope I may expect your candour, if not pardon, if I bee sometimes so particular in circumstances while I discours of things wherin I take so much delight, for even Julius Scaliger who doth not use to bee tedious, being a notable huntsman himself when hee writes of doggs could not refrayne from setting down the names of some of his owne and that his beloved bich Urania pissed with one legge up.16
As an amateur scholar who really loved scholarship but disdained grand systems, Browne had the wit and the luxury to write an account that has become one of the great collection catalogues of the seventeenth century, the Musaeum Clausum or Bibliotheca Abscondita, the detailed list of a collection published by him for the information of his fellow scholars. It addressed itself to the reader with all the learnedness to be expected of one of the seventeenth century’s finest minds:
Sir,
With many thanks I return that noble Catalogue of Books, Rarities and Singularities of Art and Nature, which you were pleased to communicate unto me. There are many Collections of this kind in Europe. And, besides the printed accounts of the Museum Aldrovandi, Calceolarianum Voscardi, Vormianum; the Casa Abhellita at Loretto, and Threasor of S. Dennis, the Repository of the Duke of Tuscany, that of the Duke of Saxony, and that noble one of the Emperour at Vienna, and many more are of singular note. Of what in this kind I have by me I shall maide no repetition, and you having already had a view thereof, I am bold to present you with the List of a Collection, which I may justly say you have not seen before.
The Title is, as above, Musaeum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita: containing some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living.
He who knows where all this Treasure now is, is a great Apollo. I’m sure I am not He. However, I am,
Sir, Yours, &c.
Thomas Browne
The following catalogue then lists in great detail a number of items so wonderful that they deserve to be described, at least in part, in Browne’s own words:
Draughts of three passionate Looks; of Thyestes when he was told at the Table that he had eaten a piece of his own Son; of Bajazet when he went into the Iron Cage; of OEdipus when he first came to know that he had killed his Father, and married his own Mother.
A fair English Lady drawn Al Negro, or in the ethiopian hue excelling the original White and Red Beauty, with this Subscription, Sed quondam volo nocte Nioriorem.
Mummia Tholosana; or, The complete Head and Body of Father Crispin, buried long ago in the Vault of the Cordeliers at Tholouse, where the Skins of the dead so drie and parch up without corruption that their persons may be known very long after, with this Inscription, Ecce iterum Crispinus.
King Mithridates his Oneirocritica. Aristotle de Precationibus. Democritus de his quz fiunt apad Orcum, Oceani circumnavigatio. A defence of Arnoldus de Villa Nova, whom the learned Postellus conceived to be the author of De Tribe Impostoribus. A learned explanation of the receit to make a divell … A Tragedy of Thyestes, and another of Medea, writ by Diogenes the Cynick. King Alfred upon Aristotle de Plantis. Seneca’s Epistles to S. Paul. King Solomon de Umbris Idzarurn, which Chicus Asculanus, in his Comment upon Johannes de Sacrobosco, would make us believe he saw in the Library of the Duke of Bavaria.
Ars honest petandi in societate by M. Ortuinum (the art of farting decently in public, by Hardouin de Graetz).
Imitations Johann Fischart’s Catalogus Catalogarum (1590)
Joh. Faust Magia Naturalis, Fledermaeuse zu machen in 16mo in: Catalogus Etlicher sehr alter Buecher welche Neulin in Irrland oaf einem alten eroberten Schlosse in einer Bibliothec gefunden worden 4to frankfort 165017
This collection stands out among the great cabinets of rarities, as it contains works that could not be found anywhere else but here: the art of farting decently in public might have been of limited use in polite society; scholars, however, would have given anything for some of the books. Original works by King Alfred, the correspondence between a Roman stoic and Saint Paul himself, even King Solomon and Doctor Faust feature in this roll call of all that was unattainable, a great wish list of literature. It may therefore come as little surprise that none of these works existed outside of this catalogue. Browne, however, epitomized the spirit of the cabinet of rarities and its attractions, very similar to Tradescant’s Ark, which he might have visited and of which he possessed the catalogue, the Musaeum Tradescantianum, the first and ill-fated cooperation between John Tradescant and the devious Elias Ashmole.
Browne had a fine collection of books on cabinets of curiosities himself, with a clear emphasis on those dealing with natural history. The sale of his library included volumes such as Francesco Calceolari’s Musaeum Calceolarium (1622), several works by Ulisse Aldrovandi (their beautiful names are worth reciting for sheer pleasure: Musaeum metallicum; Serpentum et draconum historiae; De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis et oviparis, etc.) and Athanasius Kircher’s famous works inspired by his Vatican collection, such as the Obeliscus Pamphilius; Oedipus Aegyptiacus; Mundus Subterraneus; and China Illustrata.
Browne was well versed in collecting literature. He had even taken the trouble to write an entire book himself refuting what he believed to be ‘vulgar errors’ about creatures and natural phenomena such as could be found in the cabinets of the time. He was also, however, intrigued by the sheer beauty of strangeness that seemed to rule these collections, and the minds that amassed them. Apart from the farce in the rather Mozartian scatology of some of the imaginary books this collection is one of high drama, a fictional realization of every collector’s dream. There is the strangeness of foreign lands in the subcollection of leaning towers and the drawing of the moonlight market, tragedy and terror in the face of Oedipus frozen at the moment of his deepest despair (a device foreshadowing the career of the Viennese sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who would depict himself in states of emotional extremes some 200 years later), terror of a different kind in the accounts of torture, the wonderfully brazen idea of an English woman drawn ‘al negro’, a real mummy with a beautiful story to boot, and the conflagration of nature and religion so beloved of Mannerism in the cross fashioned from a frog skull. No cabinet could have been conceived more perfectly.
While Browne amused himself by holding up his contemporaries’ obsessions to ridicule he himself was by no means immune to this folly. After a visit to his house, John Evelyn, who had also written about Sir Hans Sloane, noted: ‘Next morning I went to see Sir Th: Browne […] whose whole house & Garden being a Paradise & Cabinet of rarities, & that of the best collection, especialy medails, books, Plants, natural things, did exceedingly refresh me.’18
Browne’s humour as expressed in his Musaeum Clausum (in which we may also find shades of genuinely wishful thinking) hid a more sombre, melancholic side of a man constantly preoccupied with mortality, with remembrance and with memory. His Urne Buriall, or, to give it its full title
URNE – BURIALL
OR,
A Discourse on the Sepulchrall
Urnes lately found in
NORFOLK
Together with
The Garden of CYRUS
OR THE
Quincunciall, Lozenge, or
Net-work Plantations of the Ancients,
Artificially, Naturally,
Mystically Considered
With Sundry Observations
is a work of darkness and forebodings of oblivion, all the more valuable for being one of the few discursive sources in which a man who had dedicated his life to collecting and reflection deals with the reality that nevertheless is perhaps the single greatest presence in every collection: death. From the very first line this ostensibly archaeological work declares its hand:
When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction was over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after considerations.19
Brown would have had a soulmate in Ecclesiastes, whose cry ‘vanity of vanities’ reverberates throughout his thinking: ‘If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death; our life is a sad composition; We live with death, and die not in a moment.’ A human life, a universe to the one who is living it, is as nothing when compared to eternity, to the sweeping tides of history. Every human mind, though, is its own trap, and ‘the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying’.20
It is this fear of ‘the necessity of oblivion’, of death as the ultimate stranger whom one cannot know without being taken by him, that fosters a need to collect, to create permanence, to treat the graveyard earth, a vast field of past urn burials, as a repository of treasures and miracles: ‘Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth it self a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us.’21 Permanence and immortality, though, recede in the same measure as they are being sought, and the urge to accumulate proves its own undoing: ‘Avarice makes us the sport of death.’ What we collect, therefore, is both instrument of our survival beyond the grave and the very reminder of our inexorable end:
Beside, to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial mementos, or coffins by our bed side, to minde us of our graves.22
In fact, the very shape of the urns found in Norfolk illustrates that in collecting things we are ‘making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth, and inward vault of our Microcosme’.23
Concluding his meditation on the last things that the urns have inspired in him, Browne declares the vessels themselves to be spectacular failures, reminding us of nothing more than death and decay and not of those who sought to gain eternity through them:
Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion.24
The boundless optimism of the Renaissance cabinet, of the scholar searching for celestial harmonies and for truth through symbolic representation of universal principles, had made way for scepticism, certain only of the last uncertainties. Browne would still quote the authors of antiquity against the ‘vulgar errors’ he attacked, but the world had moved on into territories ‘never known by the ancients’. Europe and the European mind increasingly had nothing to rely on but itself.
Every collection is a theatre of memories, a dramatization and a mise-en-scène of personal and collective pasts, of a remembered childhood and of remembrance after death. It guarantees the presence of these memories through the objects evoking them. It is more even than a symbolic presence: a transubstantiation. The world beyond what we can touch is with us in and through them, and through communion with them it is possible to commune with it and become part of it.
Giulio Camillo was the only person to try to collect the world in its entirety through allegorical representation: every element, every human quality and activity, every realm of the physical and metaphysical worlds had a place in his theatre, was localized and put into context. He who possessed this theatre possessed the world in its entirety as a metaphor, as mythological representation in hundreds of allegorical images. Others created individual collections of the mind: ideal and grotesque, sacramental and satirical.25 The writings of Jorge Luis Borges are informed by the same mischievous sensibility, but the art of memory as an instrument of understanding the world and conquering the spirit has long since died or been relegated to the fairground with mnemonic conjuring tricks of people appearing on television and parading their ability to memorize sequences of playing cards or random numbers. How are the mighty fallen!
While the palaces of memory of old have fallen into disrepair and been replaced by computers and circus tents, the idea of the imaginary collection lives on, not least in literature, and in the mind of every collector aspiring to the ideal object to round off an ensemble. It lives on in other forms as well, in collections that very obviously encase memories or a conception of the past, in local museums devoted to the lives of people from decades or centuries ago, or in the private shrines erected to remember the dead; rooms furnished to remember what would otherwise be irrevocably lost.
Can one be a collector without actually collecting or amassing anything, but by giving away? Many collectors were also great patrons and patronage has always been the other face of collecting, be it through commissioning artists or through endowments, but it is only after meeting Alberto Vilar, the grandest patron of opera in perhaps any century, that I really began to entertain this notion.
For someone who is the benefactor to end all benefactors, Alberto Vilar is at first sight remarkably unremarkable: a man of average height, slender, with neat, greying hair and oval glasses, dressed in pinstripe trousers and open shirt and a cardigan with colourful leather appliqué (red and bright green), more a vision of your average American middle manager home from work than a purveyor of generosity on a scale unprecedented since the Medici.
By his own estimation, Vilar, who became a financier rather than a musician at the insistence of his father, and who has made his fortune by investing heavily in firms like Microsoft and Cisco Systems since the early 1980s, has given $150 million to opera houses and other arts institutions over the last ten years or so. Today one can go to see an opera in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Milan, Bayreuth, Vienna, London and St Petersburg and the likelihood is that the hall in which one sits, the surtitles one watches, the air conditioning, the training of one of the singers one sees, or sometimes the entire production have been paid for in full by Alberto Vilar. ‘This season the Met will put on six of my operas at $2 million a piece and I’m proud of every one of those operas,’ he says with obvious satisfaction. 26
Vilar does not just like being acknowledged, he thinks it is imperative, and to his eyes the appreciation of the public is strangely skewed:
There’s much superficial recognition of the singers, as if the whole art form depended on them. Not that they’re not important but I say, guess what: the singers wouldn’t exist without the philanthropy. I have many friends who are professional singers and 100 per cent of my friends like me, they like what I do. There’s no opera program in the world that doesn’t have pictures of the singers, and some have pictures of the intendant, the director, the conductor, pictures of pictures, but never of the sponsor. Let me crack the code of philanthropy for you: You Must Appreciate. Human beings like to hear the word Thank You. When you give $50 million the least people can do is to say Thank You. I just find it strange that you are walking around that house and nobody knows you.
Vilar indulges his taste for grand opera, ideally Puccini’s Turandot staged by Franco Zeffirelli, by underwriting the productions. This gives him a good deal of power and considerable influence on the policy even of big opera houses. He denies this but obliges with an anecdote illustrating it:
Bayreuth commissioned Jürgen Flimm to do a Ring. Well, he went a little bit overboard and most people said so. It turns out that the Met was going to do a production of Fidelio, which is one of my favourite operas, and guess who was going to do it? Juürgen Flimm. So I called up Joe [Volpe, Chief Executive of the Met] and said ‘Joe, are we going to do this crazy thing that we had in Bayreuth?’ and he said: ‘No, Alberto, we are controlling this.’ So I underwrote the production. It was OK. I don’t say to the Met you will put on him or her, I just say yes or no, I simply say ‘I wouldn’t be comfortable with this production, or, this production is too modern for me.’
Is it possible that Vilar collects by giving? That he gains the esteem and the culture that would not usually be accorded to a financier, and collects entire opera productions (without taking them home), just as Pierpont Morgan collected incunabula?27 His New York apartment is a shrine to opera and to music and many of its features are imitations of ornaments from great opera houses and concert halls around the world. His generosity has given him power and control in a world that is notoriously difficult to control and to influence. He has bought more than recognition. He has managed, more subtly than a politician and more effectively than a great artist, to make the world of opera his world, simply by purchasing it, and he now spends much of his time travelling around the world to visit ‘his’ productions and to enjoy the paraphernalia: a production in Milan, the next in St Petersburg, board meetings at the Metropolitan Opera, and evenings with celebrated artists, all results of his willingness to part with what he himself terms his ‘hard-earned cash’. Is this not a kind of collection?
