Non-Fiction: Collecting is a fundamental human activity. Men have always collected empires and money, while women have populated nurseries.
The most ardent imperialists, misers and begetters alike have sought to grasp the world to attain a sense of immortality. As Patrick Mauriès sympathetically shows in this richly imaginative, sumptuously illustrated work, collectors have attempted to cram symbols of the whole cosmos into the drawers, boxes and display shelves of their "cabinets of curiosities".
The mock Latin phrase omnium gatherum was coined in the 16th century - the period when Mauriès's survey begins - to signify a collection of everything or at least representative emblems of a universal miscellany, to try to cling on to all reality in miniature and to impose artificial order on natural chaos. This wonderful book encompasses all aesthetics and philosophy on the convenient scale of the coffee table.
With photographs, paintings and engravings, in colour and black and white, beautifully printed in Italy, Mauriès presents the characteristically elaborate collections of rich and powerful men from Emperor Rudolf II to Alistair McAlpine, inheritor of the eponymous construction company and its regiment of fusiliers. As Mauriès points out, collectors "need to see reflected in the objects of their collections an exhilarating, narcissistic projection of their own self-image".
The collections include exquisite artefacts of gold, silver, ivory and precious stones; humanoid automata, fantastically intricate clocks, terrestrial and celestial globes; animal, vegetable and mineral specimens of little or no intrinsic monetary value and some of value beyond measure, if only to their owners. There are seashells, corals and fossils, prodigies and freaks of nature, such as a sheep with three heads, and fabulous esoterica, such as the horn of a "unicorn" and the skeleton of a "mermaid".
There is a solemn grandeur about the extravagance of obsessive acquisitiveness. The collections are awesome, but not without their ludic elements, and a certain pathos. "The collector," Mauriès writes, "in much the same way as a sorcerer or alchemist, became the master or manipulator of the pulsing forces that ebbed and flowed silently across the real world: the aura of a star, the energy of a body that appeared dead, the power of a talisman, astrological influences and the inspiration of plants and minerals." The supreme collector attempted to comprehend the unity of all creation, thus becoming something of a creator himself.
"The aim of any collection," the author goes on, "is to halt the passage of time, to freeze the ineluctable progress of life or history, and to replace it with the fragmented, controllable, circular time frame established by a finite series of objects that can be collected in full." And there, of course, is the rub, for collectors pass on and only their collections remain, as memorials to defunct egos. This book is a splendid memento mori.
Cabinets of Curiosities. By Patrick Mauriès. Thames & Hudson 256pp.
£39.95
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic