Notes

I A Parliament of Monsters

The Dragon and the Tartar Lamb

1 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, Serpentum et draconum historiae, p. 402.

2 Obviously Aldrovandi thought the visit important enough, or was flattered enough, to record it nevertheless. Bibliotheca Universitaria, Bologna, Aldrovandi, MS 35, cc. 203.

3 Quoted in M. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeeth Centuries, Philadelphia, PA, 1964, p. 119.

4 It is understandably difficult to ascertain the structure and particularly the function of early collections as well as the mentality that brought them into being. For a broad-brush treatment of this subject, see: Taylor; and Rheims.

5 The great orator Cicero made his name as a young Roman lawyer by prosecuting one of the greediest collectors history has seen: Caius Tullius Verres, the Quaestor (Governor) of Sicily, who had ransacked the island and its temples for works of art. Cicero’s speeches are preserved in his Orationes contra Verres. Verres was sentenced and fled the reach of the Roman jurisdiction. See: L. H. G. Greenwood, The Verrine Orations: An Introduction, New York, 1928, pp. 9–22. For more general treatments of Roman collecting, see also Bonnaffé, Les collectionneurs de l’ancienne Rome; and Fabbrini.

6 On medieval treasuries and their development in general, see: Minges. We know of relatively few medieval collectors; the greatest of them was certainly Jean, duc de Berry, who assembled and commissioned works of art, books, and gems. Minges points out that the medieval French estude preceded the Italian studiolo. See: Guiffrey; and D. Thornton, The Scholar in his Study. Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy, New Haven, CT, 1997.

7 For the most meticulous investigation of the studiolo and its cultural significance, see: Liebenwein.

8 Quoted in Hibbert, p. 91.

9 For more on the Medici and their collections, see: Berti.

10 Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, London, 1986, p. 95.

11 Jean de Léry, Historie d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dit Amerique, La Rochelle, 1578. This crucial moment in European intellectual history and its importance for the history of collecting is summed up very well in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. For a more general treatment, see: Kupperman.

12 Francesco Stelluri, Persio tradotto, Rome, 1630, quoted in Giuseppe Gabrieli, Contributi alla storia della Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, 1989, vol. I, p. 354.

13 Quoted in Clara Sue Kidwell, ‘The Accademia dei Lie “Apiarium”: A Case Study of the Activities of a Seventeenth-Century Scientific Society’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1970, p. 307.

14 It seems significant that the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, though working in the Vatican, was one of the very few exponents of this neo-Platonist tendency in Italy. Kircher was, of course, a German.

15 Here quoted in David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use, Glasgow, 1904, vol. I, pp. 19–20.

16 Bernhard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. J. P. Mingne, 221 vols, Paris, 1884–94, vol. 182, pp. 91ff. For an English translation of relevant passages, see: Cecilia Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art, 300–1150: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971, pp. 168–70.

17 In Saturn und die Melancholie Raymond Klibansky and Fritz Saxl have given an elegant exposition of the Church’s opposition to curiosity and its polemic against it. Intelligence, it was felt, should be concentrated on a contemplation of divine mysteries, not on fruitless chases for temporal frivolity. It may be speculated that this, in addition to the lack of expendable income and of mass-produced goods among the majority of Europe’s people, was one reason why the passion for collecting gripped Europe only at the time of the Renaissance. If it is true that collecting is partly motivated by an awareness of mortality and a desire to overcome it, then the Christian world view, in which death was by no means the final step into darkness, would have obviated such an occupation.

18 Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals’, in Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen, London, 1958, pp. 105–6. See also: ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, in Montaigne, Essays, trans. Charles Cotton, ed. C. C. Hazlitt, Chicago, IL, 1955, p. 257.

19 Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, p. 17.

20 On this question see: Ariès.

21 Robert Herrick, ‘To the Virgins To Make Much of Time’, in Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse, Oxford, 1972, p. 243.

22 The most influential of these, Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones vel tituli, appeared in 1565. Quiccheberg, whose name appears in Aldrovandi’s guest book, distinguished between five orders of objects: artificialia, naturalia, works of craftsmanship, mechanical objects and diversa. Worm, in contrast to this, ordered the objects in his collection according to their materials. For other important works describing collections and discussing their order, see: Calceolari; Johnson; Major; Rumphius; Tradescant; and Worm.

23 These objects were often brought back in less than dignified circumstances. An advertisement in the Amsterdamse Courant, 11 October 1695, promises a reward to the finder of a stolen seaman’s chest, which contained, next to dirty washing, also porcelain, ornamental vases, birds’ nests, an ‘Indian’ bow with arrows, an ivory box with silver ornaments, a Japanese writing box, a tea table and several different exotic fabrics. See: J. van der Waals, De prentschat von Michiel Hinloopen, The Hague and Amsterdam, 1988, pp. 220–30.

24 ‘… sonderling-heden oft rariteyten ende wtgelesen sinnelickheden van Indiaensche ende ander wtheemsche zee-horens, schelpen, eerd ende zeege-wassen, mineralen ende oock vreemde gedierten; mitsgaders eenighe con-stichlyck ghemaecte hanswerken ende schilderyen’. Catalogus oft Register van de sonderling-heden oft rariteyten ente wtgelesen sinnelickheden…, Leiden, 1628.

25 Examples of such tiny cabinets, made for Miss Sara Rothé, survive in the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. One of them contains a miniature collection of manuscripts, sea urchins and shells, another has drawers just big enough to contain one coin each.

26 The majority of these collections were established after 1650, but already around 1585 individual cabinets are known. For an analysis of this phenomenon, see: Jaap van der Veen, ‘Die klain Vertrek bevat en Weereld vol gewoel’, in Bergvelt and Kistemaker. For a general analysis of this period see: Schama.

27 This particularly Dutch combination of Calvinist principle and trading wealth has been described by Schama as well as by Geert Mak in his Amsterdam: Biography of a City, London, 1999.

28 Quoted in F. W. T. Hunger, ‘Bernadus Paludanus (Berent ten Broecke), 1550–1633. Zijn verzamelingen aen zijn werk’, in C. P. Burger, Jr., and F. W. T. Hunger, eds, Itinerario. Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592, The Hague, 1934, vol. 3, pp. 249–68, here p. 260.

29 S. C. Snellen van Vollenhove, ‘Jan Swammerdam’s Catalogus’, in De Nederlandsche Spectator, 1866, p. 126.

A Melancholy Ailment

1 Published in 1661. Quoted here in the Garnier Flammarion edition, Paris, 1970: ‘Vous vous étonnez comme cette matière, brouillée peêle-meêle, au gré du hasard, peut avoir constitué un homme, vu qu’il y avait tant de choses nécessaires à la construction de son être, mais vous ne savez pas que cet millions de fois cette manière, s’acheminant au dessein d’un homme, s’est arrêtée à former tantoôt une comète, pour le trop ou le trop peu de certaines figures qu’il fallait ou ne fallait pas à designer un homme? Si bien que ce n’est pas merveille qu’entre une infinie quantité de matière qui change et se remue incessamment, elle ait recontreé à faire le peu d’animaux, le végétaux, de minérvaux que nous voyons; non plus que ce n’est pas merveille qu’en cent coups de dés il arrive un rafle. Aussie bien est-il impossible que de ce remuement il ne se fasse quelque chose, et cette chose sera toujours admirée d’un étourdi qui ne saura pas combien peu s’en est fallu qu’elle n’ait pas été faite’ (trans. Patrick Creagh).

2 The extent to which there was indeed a prevalence of clinical schizophrenia in the Habsburg family has often been debated. In his Rudolf II, pp. 48–9, Evans voices scepticism about some of the more radical analyses of the family history, which ascribed schizophrenia not only to Rudolf and Philip II, but also to Joanna the Mad, Don Carlos, the Duke of Cleves and Philip III. See: H. Luxemberger: ‘Psychiatrisch-erbbiologisches Gutachten über Don Julio d’Austria’, in MVGDB 70, 1932, pp. 41–54. Rumour at the Prague court had it that Rudolf had been ill with syphilis since 1579, but despite references to his ‘dissipation’ such allegations are impossible to prove.

3 C. Douais, ed., Dépêches de M. de Fourquevaux, amassadeur du rui Charles IX en Espagne, 1565–72, 3 vols., Paris, 1896–1904, here vol. I, p. 106.

4 Some rarities had found their way into Europe already during the Middle Ages, of course. They were often kept in the treasures of aristocratic families or in churches. A church near Halberstadt in Germany displayed the ribs of a whale, while Santa Maria delle Grazie near Mantua sported a stuffed crocodile and a church in Ensisheim, Alsace, a meteorite, several rhinoceros horns and ostrich eggs. Objects that did not fit into the picture of God’s creation could thus at least be neutralized by their sacred surroundings and bound in to a larger narrative of miracles and the unlimited powers of the Creator.

5 Iter Germanicum: Relatio epistolica Danielis Eremitae Belgae de Legatione Magni Hetruriae Ducis ad Rudolphum II… , Vienna, 1637, p. 299.

6 Marie Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation of What Passed Between Doctor Dee … And Some Spirit …, London, 1659, p. 231.

7 The foundations of this early form of science had been laid by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), who had served another great collector, Cosimo de’ Medici, and by the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541), who in ordinary life went by the delectable name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. It is therefore not surprising to find among the physicians at Rudolf’s court neo-Platonists such as Michael Maier and Robert Fludd, whose Utriusque Cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica atque technica historia in duo volumina secundum cosmi differentiam divisa (1617–19) detailed the history of macrocosm and microcosm according to a system of correspondences and hierarchies, sympathies and harmony, allowing initiates to manipulate the material world by intervening in the spirit realm, and vice versa.

8 Burton, p. 129.

9 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, c. 1610, I.2.404.

10 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, de ente et uno e scritti vari, Florence, 1949, p. 380.

11 Bacon, The Great Instauration, in The Works, vol. III, 1857, pp. 345– 60.

12 Quoted in Aldofo Venturi, ‘Zur Geschichte der Kunstsammlungen Kaiser Rudolf II’, in Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 8, 1885, p. 15.

13 A. Grindely, Rudolf II. Und seine Zeit, 1600–1612, Prague, 1868, p. 27.

An Ark Abducted

1 Here quoted in Allen, p. 34.

2 State Papers Domestic, vol. IV, ch. 1, pp. 155–6.

3 P. Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, London, 1914, vol. III.

4 Topsell, p. 91.

5 Stirn visited Tradescant in 1638. His account is preserved in manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: ‘An Illustrated Account in German of the Travels of a Student of Altdorf, 1632–40’, MS ADD 438 B.67.

6 Elias Ashmole, Diary, quoted in Allen, p. 192.

7 Ibid., Appendix.

The Exquisite Art of Dr Ruysch

1 Bacon, vol. III, 1857, pt III, bk 2, p. 330.

2 A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout ‘Death Enlightened’, in Jama 212, 1970, p. 121.

3 In the words of the collection’s first Librarian and Keeper of Rarities, Johann Schumacher, Pis ’ma I bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo I, St Petersburg, 1887, p. 240.

4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in a memorandum to Peter the Great, in V. Gerje, Otnoschenije Leibinitza k Rossii I Petru Velikomu, St Petersburg, 1871, p. 76.

5 Johann Schumacher on his instructions, in P. Petarskij, Nauka I Literatura pri Petri Velikom, St Petersburg, 1862.

6 F. de la Neuville, A Curious and New Account of Muscovy in the Year 1689, ed. L. Hughes, London, 1994, p. 59.

7 Peter I to Andrei Vinius, quoted in Schumacher (see note 3 to this chapter), pp. 649ff.

II A Complete History of Butterflies

This Curious Old Gentleman

1 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica…, 2 vols, London, 1707–25, vol. I, Preface.

2 Thomas Birch, ‘Memoirs Relating to the Life of Sir Hans Sloane Bart formerly President of the Royal Society’, British Library, Additional MS 4241, pp. 3–4.

3 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

4 Sloane (see note 1 to this chapter), vol. I, Preface.

5 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, London, 1959, p. 48.

6 On Courten’s collection and intellectual outlook see also: ‘Classification and Value in a 17th-century Museum: William Courten’s Collection’, in Journal of the History of Collections 9.1, 1997, pp. 61–77.

7 Joseph Hunter, ed., The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, FRS, London, 1830, vol. I, p. 343.

8 Quoted in MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, pp. 28–9. While the headings of the categories are by Sloane himself and published in the Introduction of his A Voyage in 1725, the numbers of items relate to the final size of the collection as it appears in the 1753 inventory.

9 Quoted in Jean Jacquot, ‘Sir Hans Sloane and French Men of Science’, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society 10, 1953, pp. 91–3. The original manuscript is kept at the Institute de France, Paris, MS 1797.

10 Quoted in MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, p. 71.

11 Ibid., p. 86.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 John Coleman to C. Hutton, in C. Hutton Beale, ed., Catherine Hutton and her Friends, Birmingham, 1895, p. 112.

16 Quoted in Alma S. Wittllin, The Museum, Its History and Its Tasks in Education, London, 1949, p. 113.

17 A similar fate, incidentally, befell the last surviving specimen of a stuffed dodo that used to be in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Once in the Tradescant Collection, the precious and long-extinct bird was consigned to the storerooms since it was no longer in very good condition. Some decades later a museum employee came across the somewhat mottled exhibit and thought that it was beyond repair. Unaware that this was not just any old bird he threw it away. Today the Pitt Rivers Museum is the proud exhibitor of a dodo foot and skull.

18 The hapless German scholar was not alone in his revulsion against the intrusion of eroticism into the innocence of nature, nor was he the last. In 1874 John Ruskin, horrified by the idea of some plants being hermaphrodite, wrote: ‘With these obscene processes and prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing whatever to do.’ See: Keith West, How to Draw Plants: The Techniques of Botanical Illustration, New York, 1987, p. 59.

The Mastodon and the Taxonomy of Memory

1 In Elsner and Cardinal, Susan Stewart gives a good account of the programme of the Peale Museum.

2 Charles W. Peale, Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature with Original Music composed for, and Sung on, the Occasion. Delivered in The Hall of the University of Pennsylvania, November 8, 1800, Philadelphia, 1800, p. 34.

3 I am indebted for this reading of the works to Stewart (see note 1 to this chapter).

Angelus Novus

1 Browne, p. 74.

2 Bauer, p. 82.

3 Ibid., p. 83.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 99.

The Greatness of Empires

1 Bruno Schulz, Sklepy cynamonowe, Sanatorim Pod Kepsydr, Cracow, 1957, p. 139; trans. PB.

2 J. Stählin, Originalanekdoten von Peder dem Grossen, Leipzig, 1785/1988, p. 58.

3 On the organization of early modern collections, see also: Minges.

4 Quoted in Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, Cambridge, 1994, p. 108.

5 Quoted in Jean Chatelain, Dominique Vivant Denon et le Louvre de Napoléon, Paris, 1973, pp. 50–51.

6 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

7 Ibid., p. 102.

8 Quoted in Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London, 1992, p. 174.

9 In Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, 1920, pp 204–10, here p. 206.

10 Quoted after McClellan (see note 4 to this chapter), p. 108.

11 Quoted after Chatelain (see note 5 to this chapter), p. 169.

12 There were precedents to this chronological approach, of course, though Denon’s arrangement proved the most influential. Already in 1726 the German Johann Friedrich Christ had identified different stages in German art, while the galleries of Johann Wilhelm of the Palatinate and the Vienna Belvedere, discussed in the text, were other examples. See: Minges, pp. 155, 159, passim.

13 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke… , p. 54. Digitale Bibliothek Band 1: Deutsche Litera-tur, S. 102298 (vgl. Winckelmann-BDK, S. 35–6); trans. PB.

14 Chatelain (see note 5 to this chapter), p. 272.

15 In another twist of museum history the former imperial stables have been converted into a new Museum Quarter in 2001. It comprises two new buildings containing important collections of modern and contemporary art (the Sammlung Ludwig and the Sammlung Leopold), as well as artists’ studios and workshops, a concert hall and exhibition spaces. Together with the Museums of Natural History and of the History of Art across the road this new institution now forms the largest museum complex in Europe. The design of the Museum Quarter, with its workshops and flexible exhibition spaces, emphasizes change and the mutability of a new museum concept, away from the monumental universality of former times and back, perhaps, to a more experimental spirit.

16 Sir William Henry Flower, Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History, London, 1898, p. 18.

17 ‘On the Principles of Classification Adopted in the Arrangement of His Anthropological Collections, Now Exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum’, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute 4, 1875, pp. 293–4.

An Elevator to the Heavens

1 Quoted in Strouse, p. 38.

2 Ibid., p. 486.

3 Ibid., p. 492.

4 Quoted in Berman, p. 68.

5 Ibid., p. 82.

6 Ibid., p. 73.

7 Ibid., p. 106.

8 See: Swanberg, p. 415.

9 Ibid., p. 324.

10 The New York Times, 10 and 24 August 1924.

III Incantations

Epigraph

1 The original reads: ‘Et tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu. Ce goüt, c’était celuidupetit morceaudemadeleine queledimanche matinà Combray …quand j’allais lui dire bonjour dans sa chambre,matante Léonie m’offrait après l’avoir trempé dans son infusion de thé ou de tilleul… Mais, quand d’un passé ancien riennesubsiste, aprèslamort des êtres, après la destruction des térielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme les âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.’ (Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, Paris, 1954, pp. 46–7. The translation is quoted in: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, London, 1960, p. 41.

2 In Die Zeit, no. 22, 28 May 1993.

Why Boiling People is Wrong

1 Browne, p. 75.

2 Quoted in Cronin, pp. 428, 438.

3 This theory received new currency after research conducted by two French scientists, Pascal Kintz and Paul Fornes, and by the historian Ben Weider; see: the Guardian, 5 May 2000. Weider himself believes that the emperor’s murderer was the Comptede Montholon, a member of Napoleon’s St Helena entourage, who had personal grudges against his master. See: The Assassin of Napoleon, address given at the 3rd Conference of the International Napoleonic Society, on the WWW.

4 Book of Suger Abbot of St Denis on What was Done during his Administration, in Michel Bur, trans. and ed., La geste de Louis VI et autres œuvres de Suger, Paris, 1994, p. 10.

5 Ibid., p. 11.

6 Inventory St Denis, 1634, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, f. fr. 4611, folio 260.

7 A. C. Kruijt, ‘Het Koppensnellen der Toradja’s van Midden-Celebes’, in Verslagen en Mededelingen, afd. Letterkunde, 4th series, III, Netherlands, 1899, pp. 164ff.

Three Flying Ducks

1 New York, 1998, p. 237.

2 This and the following extracts are taken from ‘Unless you do these crazy things …’, interview with Robert Opie, in Elsner and Cardinal, pp. 25–48.

3 The profile of Arnold de Wit is taken from Thomas Leeflang, Verzamelen is ook een kunst, Utrecht, 1982.

4 The Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian calls collected objects ‘semiphores’, ‘carriers of meaning’. See: Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums.

Anglers and Utopias

1 Pearce in her statistical study of collecting puts the value at about 51 per cent. See: Pearce, Museums.

2 For a clinical definition of Asperger’s Syndrome, see: A. Klin and F. R. Volkmar, Asperger’s Syndrome: Guidelines for Assessment and Diagnosis, Washington, DC, 1995; and U. Frith, ed., Autism and Asperger Syndrome, Cambridge, 1991.

3 E. Newson, M. Dawson and P. Everard, ‘The Natural History of Able Autistic People: Their Management in Social Context’, in Communication, Nottingham, 1982, pp. 1–19, here p. 18.

A Theatre of Memories

1 Erasmus, Epistolae, ed. P. S. Allen et al., Oxford, 1906, X, pp. 29–30.

2 Ibid., IX, p. 479.

3 Not everyone in France was enamoured of mnemonic systems, though. While Erasmus and Melanchton pontificated about it from on high, Rabelais punctured its pretensions with more direct weapons, letting Gargantua undergo a gruelling course in the art of memory during which he has to commit to memory various absurd grammatical works with commentaries by scholars whose names alone are insults. As a result of this, he could indeed ‘recite them backward’, and was ‘as wise as any man baked in an oven’. His understanding of the world, however, was still somewhat limited, and those expecting enlightenment from him found that ‘it was no more possible to draw a word from him than a fart from a dead donkey’. François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen, London, 1970, pp. 70–72.

4 Quoted in Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 17–22.

5 Bruno had a passion for long and august titles that outdid even those used by the authors of the Baroque. One of his main works on the art of memory is called, less than succinctly: Ars reminiscendi et in phantastico campo exarandi; Explicatio triginta sigillorum ad omnium scientiarum et artium inventionem dispositionem et memoriam; Sigillus Sigillorum ad omnes animi operationes comparandas et earundem rationes habendas maxime conducens; hic enim facile invenies quidquid per logicam, metaphysicam, cabalam, naturalem magicam, artes magnas atque breves theorice inquiruntur (printed in England, 1583).

6 This is the opinion of Frances Yates, as set out in The Art of Memory, Chicago, IL, 1966, and, in more detail, in Theatre of the World, London, 1969.

7 The following reference would seem a tempting lead in a continuing search for theories of memory: Geoffrey Sonnabend, Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter. It would, however, be barking up an entirely wrong tree. This obscure academic publication by Sonnabend, who had been conducting research into the memory pathways of the carp in South America, might illuminate further the problem of artificial memory and the conservation of meaning in our world but for the fact that it cannot be found in any library. It was supposedly published in Chicago in 1946, but no American institution holds even a single copy or catalogue reference. Despite this omission Sonnabend has an entire room devoted to himself and to his work at the Museum for Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, an intriguing institution masterfully brought to the attention of the world by Lawrence Weschler in an elegant little book, Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. The museum is the closest thing our day has got to the great Wunderkammer of centuries gone by. Visitors who make it into the suburban isolation of the MJT can marvel at now extinct French and Flemish moths, the life and death of the Cameroonian Stink Ant (Megaloponera foetens), a model of Noah’s Ark (1 inch = 12.5 cubits), a horn grown on the head of a woman in the seventeenth century and originally exhibited in John Tradescant’s Ark, an illustration of the efficient but sadly neglected duck-breath therapy, a micro-sculpture of a pope inside the eye of a needle, and other wonders of the world. Familiarity breeds discontent, and doubts about the exhibits soon assert themselves. All of them are beautifully and competently displayed and documented, too beautifully perhaps. There is the story of father and son Owen Thum, two gardeners in South Platte in south-western Nebraska, who gathered together some of the collections shown here and whose photographs grace the display texts. They were cheated out of their treasures, David Wilson, the museum’s director and guiding spirit explains, by a certain Gerard Billius, who after the death of Owen Thum junior showed great cruelty to his wife, Hester. The coincidence seems too remarkable: father and son Tradescant, the English gardeners and the fight of Hester, John the younger’s wife, with Elias Ashmole – does history really repeat itself with quite such remarkable accuracy? Can it be an accident that the address of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press (9091 Divide Place, West Covina, California OX2 6DP), the publisher of the museum’s monographs, shares a postcode with Oxford University Press and with no known Californian postal area? Those tempted to dismiss the museum altogether and to declare as pure fiction the Cameroonian Stinking Ant and the fascinating series of quasi-occult ‘Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory 1915–1935’ and the zinc-inlaid black onyx box used for holding sacrificial human hearts will find the exposition of Athanasius Kircher’s life and collection scholarly and accurate. Jurassic Technology, it seems, lives on the intersection between fact and fiction but right in the heart of curiosity, in the same place occupied by the cabinets of the seventeenth century. The pamphlet of the museum itself explains: ‘The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California, is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic. Like a coat of two colors, the museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the museum serves the general public by providing the visitor with a hands-on experience of “life in the Jurassic”.’ The Lower Jurassic, a definition exclusive to David Wilson’s museum, is alive in Los Angeles, and with it the memory of the sense of the cabinet of curiosities, a memory reinterpreted and put on display, dramatized on a stage of its very own.

8 Bacon, vol. III, 1857, pp. 156, 164.

9 Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, Wheeling, IL, 1989, p. 42.

10 Ibid., p. 79.

11 Bacon, Gesta grayorum, in The Works, vol. VIII, 1862, pp. 329–42, here p. 335.

12 Francis Bacon, Distributio operis, in The Complete Essays of Francis Bacon, New York, 1963, p. 173.

13 A Catalogue of the Libraries of Sir Thomas Browne and Dr Edward Browne, His Son: A Facsimile Reproduction, Leiden, 1986.

14 Sir Thomas Browne, ‘To the Reader’, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, London, 1646.

15 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols, repr. London, 1964, vol. III, pp. 158f.

16 Ibid., p. 278. The Commonplace Books, in which this remark appears, was presumably written for Browne’s eldest son, Edward. Considering the unorganized form in which these aphorisms appear, Arno Löffler writes rather revealingly in a fine Internet essay: ‘The order in which his thoughts and observations occur is left to chance. His so-called Commonplace Books, in short, are a literary cabinet of rarities.’ See: A. Löffler, ‘The Problem of Memoria and Virtuoso Sensibility in Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus’, http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic97/loeffler/1b_97.html.

17 Browne, pp. 112–14. Browne was not the only man to invent entire libraries before Borges hit on this brilliant idea. The most famous instance of this kind was a catalogue sent to collectors in 1840 announcing the sale of the library of Jean-Nepomucene-Auguste Pichaud, Count Fortsas, a reclusive Belgian nobleman who had amassed a collection of books so rare that no other library had copies of them. The Preface of the publication explained his collecting philosophy as follows: ‘With such a system, it is easy to conceive that the collection formed by him – although during forty years he devoted considerable sums to it – could not be very numerous. But what it will be difficult to believe is, that he pitilessly expelled from his shelves books for which he had paid their weight in gold – volumes which would have been the pride of the most fastidious amateurs – as soon as he learned that a work, up to that time unknown, had been noticed in any other catalogue.’ Bids were invited by post to be sent to M Em. Hoyois, Printer and Bookseller, with a deposit from those with whom the auctioneer had done no previous business. The catalogue entries were meticulous and the titles so tempting to many collectors that bids came flooding in. The Princesse de Ligne recognized in one of them, bound, it said, in ‘green chagrin, with a lock of silver gilt’ the work of her own grandfather, who had had a considerable reputation as a womanizer. It was a memoir entitled My Campaigns in the Low Countries, with the List, Day by Day, of the Fortresses That I have Lifted to the White Arm, and bearing the bibliographic information ‘Printed by Me Alone, for Me Alone, in One Sole Copy, and for a Reason.’ Eager to avoid terrible embarrassment, the princess was willing to pay any price. Other volumes, however, were no less intriguing. Lot Number 47, the Philosophical Disputation, in Which the Anonymous Author Attempts to Show that Man before Sin Did Not Have Sex, Cologne, 1607, 4to, excited considerable interest, as did Number 43, The Aftermaths of Pleasure or the Discomfiture of the Great King in the Low Countries, At Ponent, Holland, 1686, 12mo, further described as a ‘libel of disgusting cynicism on the occasion of the fistula of Louis XIV. One of the plates represents the “royal behind” under the form of a sun surrounded with rays with the famous motto: Nec pluribus impar.’ Just before the sale was due to take place bibliophiles from across Europe who had converged upon the small town of Binche in Belgium found a short notice in the local papers announcing that the collection was not to be sold after all, but had been bought by the town itself as a memorial to its native son. The entire affair later turned out to be the brainchild of Renier Chalons, President of the Société des Bibliophiles Belges in Brussels. (Quoted in Basbanes, pp. 116–120.)

18 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, London, 1959, p. 562.

19 Browne, p. 73.

20 Ibid., p. 105.

21 Ibid., p. 76.

22 Ibid., pp. 74–5.

23 Ibid., p. 88.

24 Browne, p. 55.

25 Another lovely collection deserves an honorary mention here. Its only claim to existence is a newspaper article but, considering its subject, that seems oddly appropriate. Peter Haffner collects, he writes, exclusively the names of objects he does not understand. Among his proudest possessions are: ‘reservist jugs’, ‘Bumble Bee Children’, ‘Whole Objects on the Motive Peter Paul Rubens’ and ‘United States of America without Rubber’ (stamps, may we guess?). The apex of the collection is, for the time being, ‘Australia by the Kilo, 1966’. See: NZZ Folio, December 2000, p. 15.

26 I had the opportunity of interviewing Vilar myself at the Dorchester Hotel, London, in December 2000.

27 The connection between money and collecting has, naturally, always been intimate. Misers are, arguably, collectors of money; people for whom the fortune they possess has lost its value as a means of exchange and has assumed an existential value beyond its purchase power. The security their balance sheets represent would be injured by taking away one single penny more than is absolutely necessary, for this balance is no longer a potential of exchangeable goods and services, but the metaphysical entity between them and poverty, unhappiness or powerlessness.

IV The Tower of Fools

A Veritable Vello-Maniac

1 Norman D. Weiner, ‘On Bibliomania’, in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 35, 1966, pp. 217–32, here p. 217. His radical claim, incidentally, is borne out by Richard Heber, an early nineteenth-century English bibliophile, whose private library went into the hundreds of thousands, and whose homosexual relationship with a protégé caused a scandal in the 1820s. This trifle, however, did not keep him from proposing marriage to Richardson Currer, a great book collector in her own right, whose copy of The Book of St Albans, first published in 1486, he coveted greatly. Currer wisely kept her books to herself and never married.

2 Munby, Portrait of an Obsession, p. 267.

3 Ibid.

4 A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies III, 1954.

5 Munby, Portrait of an Obsession, p. 283.

6 A. N. L. Munby, ‘The Family Affairs of Sir Thomas Phillipps’, in Phillipps Studies II, 1953.

7 Ricci, p. 119.

8 Ibid., pp. 119–20.

9 Basbanes, p. 2.

10 I hesitate to quote Benjamin and do so only after overcoming considerable misgivings: so many trendy academics have found it necessary to cannibalize his writings in pursuit of post-modernist theory and interesting jargon that there should be a moratorium on any quotations from him. The fact, however, is that he is one of the most sensitive and most insightful commentators on this passion and that it would be a gross omission not to let him speak.

11 Benjamin, pp. 169–78, here p. 169; trans. PB.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 170.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 171.

16 Ibid., pp. 177–8.

17 Walter Benjamin,Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduz-ierbarkeit, Frankfurt, 1986, pp. 93, 105.

18 Ibid., p. 107.

19 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, Frankfurt, 1972, vol. V, p. 280.

20 Petrarch, Letters, trans. James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolf, New York, 1909, pp. 239–51.

21 Jorge Louis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’, in The Book of Sand, various translators, ed. D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby, London, 1970, p. 80.

22 Ibid., pp. 81–2.

Leporello and His Master

1 Prince Charles de Ligne, Mélanges militaire, littéraires et sentimentaires, Dresden, 1807, vol. XXXIX, quoted in Masters, pp. 280–81.

2 Casanova’s final occupation as a librarian has itself been the cause of many psychologizing comments seeking to equate the conquest of women with the collecting of books. The psychoanalyst Norman D. Weiner put a rather pitilessly Freudian interpretation on the occupation of book collecting when he wrote that bibliomaniacs were condemned never to rest but to ‘set out on another quest for a great book as soon as his anxiety returns. The quality of the boasting, the constant search for new conquest, and the delight in recounting tales of acquisition and success brings to mind the activities of the hypersexual male hysteric who must constantly reassure himself that he has not been castrated. It seems germane to this point that Casanova, after his many amatory adventures, settled down as a librarian in the castle of Count Waldstein at Dux, in Bohemia’. ‘On Bibliomania’, in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 35, 1966, pp. 217–32.

3 Masters, p. 221.

4 That same collector devotes much of his day to recording musical broadcasts from across the world via a digital receiver. Frequently, four tape recorders will run at one time, capturing, say, a chamber music recital from Czech radio, an opera on the BBC and a symphony concert each from Spain and Austria. He has long since lost count of how many tapes he possesses, or how many recordings of one particular work. Moreover, his relentless recording schedule leaves him hardly any time to listen to any of his treasures, much less to catalogue them. Some collectors, it seems, collect for an anticipated hereafter, collect as if death would not exist, or perhaps in order to convince themselves that it does not.

5 Quoted in Rheims, p. 28.

6 Maurice Rheims, La vie étrange des objects, Paris, 1956, p. 28.

7 Jacques Attali, Mémoire de Dablier: Collections, mode d’emploi, Paris, 1997, pp. 44, 51, passim. Attali makes his observation in an especially interesting context. The book describes his own collection of hourglasses, mementi mori and symbols of impending death since their inception. Eros and Thanatos are never far apart. Rheims (p. 29, passim) has made the same point.

8 Muensterberger makes a valiant attempt at formulating a comprehensive psychoanalytical picture of the collector, but the result illustrates, if anything, the impossibility of doing so.

9 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, trans. M. Nunberg, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, New York, 1962, 19 Febraury 1908, vol. I, p. 321.

10 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1907, ed. J. M. Masson, Cambridge, MA, 1984, 24 January 1895, p. 110.

11 Rheims (see note 6 to this chapter), p. 50. Another French author, Jean Baudrillard, takes this erotic analogy between pets and objects one mercilessly psychoanalysing step further. To be domesticated pets are frequently castrated, just as objects are rendered neutral in a collection: ‘Let us observe in passing that pets are never sexually distinct (indeed they are occasionally castrated for domestic purposes): although alive, they are as sexually neutral as any inert object. Indeed this is the price one has to pay if they are to be emotionally comforting, given that castration, real or symbolic, is what allows them to play, on their owner’s behalf, the role of regulating castration anxiety.’ ‘The System of Collecting’, in Elsner and Cardinal, pp. 10–11.

Mr Soane is Not at Home

1 Louis-Henri de Loménie, Comte de Brienne, Mémoires, ed. Paul Bonnefon, Paris 1916–19, vol. III, pp. 88–90.

2 Quoted in Arthur T. Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane RA, London, 1927, p. 12.

3 Alexander Penrose, ed., The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, London, 1927, pp. 305–7.

4 Sir John Soane, Memoirs of the Professional Life of an Architect, London, 1835.

5 Sir John Soane, Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1835, p. 88.

6 Browne, p. 55.

7 Anonymous, Le danse macabre, Paris, 1485, after a danse macabre painted in 1424 in the arcades of the ossiarium of the Franciscan Cimetière aux SS. Innocents by the rue de la Ferronerie in Paris. It seems worth noting that it is the bourgeois who is seen as the amasser and collector of things. This new creature in the social universe was soon to dominate collecting and to bring it into its own after it had languished at princely palaces for so long.