The Pleasures of Collecting

by Gardner C. Teall

Of course, there were hundreds, one may venture to say thousands, of collectors who were his contemporaries; for the love of beautiful and of interesting things is seldom separated in the normal person from the desire to own them, a desire that has produced more history and more romance than one would dream of.

There are those who dissolve pearls in wine, those who treasure them in necklaces; these two sorts are in the world. To Petrarch each scrap of writing was as precious as a pearl to be added to a necklace to adorn the fair throat of Learning, and his accomplishment, his devotion to this hobby, marks him as the very Prince of Collectors of Yesterday.

I suppose there have been collectors ever since things were discovered to be collectable. Every object of human creation seems eventually to fall within the collecting class, Father Time saying when. C. Plini Caecilii Secundi Epistularum sounds somewhat formidable to the ears of a foe to the classics, but it lately yielded this morsel from the eighth letter of Book VIII, a letter from Pliny to his good friend Rufinus:

You have now all the town gossip; nothing but talk about Tullus. We look forward to the Auction Sale of his effects. He was so great a collector that the very day he purchased a vast garden, he was able to adorn it completely with antique statues drawn from his stores of art treasures.

Ancient Domitius Tullus! would that we knew how your sale came out! Did you turn in your tomb that some Eros from Praxiteles’s own hand, some Amor chiseled by great Phidias himself, fetched but a hundredth of its value? Or did you rush off to Dis and to Proserpina with the gleeful tale of how friend Pliny, who thought to get something for nothing, was forced up to a prince’s ransom by Lucanus in the matter of that little sardonyx gem, engraved by Pyrgoteles, finer, the auctioneer declared, than the Perseus by Dioskourides? How human it is to wish to know!

Those old Romans were great collectors. Even when the creative spirit had degenerated they were appreciators of the fine things which the Greeks had produced. Petronius, that arbiter elegantiarum of Nero’s court, amassed thousands of remarkable art treasures that even the emperor longed to possess. Incurring Nero’s displeasure, and dying under the Emperor’s orders, he disdained to imitate the servility of those who, under like penalty, made Nero heir to their possessions and, as Suetonius tells us, filled their wills with encomiums of the tyrant and his favorites. Petronius broke to bits a precious goblet out of which he commonly drank, that Nero, who had coveted it, might not have the pleasure of using it. Incendiary, violinistic Nero, Nero who on shaving off his beard for the first time put it in a golden box studded with precious gems! What would not collectors of a lock of hair of this great one, and of that, give to discover the beard of Nero!

I dare say, in no time was human nature more perfectly understood than in Roman days. Even Augustus Cæsar was wont to amuse himself by a device explained by gossipy Suetonius as follows: “He used to sell by lot amongst his guests articles of very unequal value, and pictures with their fronts reversed; and so, by the unknown quality of the lot, disappoint or gratify the expectation of the purchasers. This sort of traffic went round the whole company, every one being obliged to buy something, and to run the chance of loss or gain with the rest.” How many of us who have frequented the art sales in American cities, from the old Clinton Hall auction days to the present, would have imagined that Pliny took such things as seriously, Augustus Cæsar such things in jest? How old the new world is, how new the old!

From the time of the ancient Athenian vase shops, and even from long before that, to our own day, when we may browse in the realms of antiquarians at home, the bazaars of the Far East and the quaint inglenooks of Europe when we are traveling, collecting has been a passion with the many as well as a mania of the few. But we, ourselves, are more prone to collect the things of yesterday than were the collectors of yesterday to collect the things of the centuries before their time.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, found time when steering through the perilous channels of endless family feuds to immortalize himself as a collector. To the efforts of Cosimo, his grandfather, are due those priceless classical and Oriental manuscripts which formed the nucleus of the Laurentian Library in Florence. The grandson was worthy of his forebear. Through Joannes Lascaris he procured from the monastery of Mount Athos two hundred manuscripts of greatest importance for the Laurentian, an incomparable collection, which, together with other works of art, disappeared at the sacking of Florence during the rule of Lorenzo’s wretchedly incompetent son, Piero. Lorenzo, notwithstanding his love for ancient works of art, was a ready patron of the art of his time. Lorenzo’s daughter, Catherine de’ Medici, had all the Medici love for art, and she, too, patronized living artists lavishly, as her husband’s father, Francis I, had done in France before her. She it was who took such constructively active thought for the planning of the Tuileries, and her interest in books, manuscripts, and other things led to enriching the collections of the Bibliothéque Nationale.

What a remarkable list of collectors France can write in her Golden Book of Art-Lovers—Jean Grolier, De Thou, Pierre Jean Mariette, Cardinal Mazarin, Comte de Caylus—to name but a few of literally thousands! Nor must we forget Madame de Pompadour, whose library and marvelous collection of works of art were sold after her death. There is no question that Madame de Pompadour took a constructive interest in art and literature, an interest which led Voltaire to assert that without her patronage the culture of her time would have found itself in sorry plight under the rule of a king whose thoughts had little or nothing to do with the finer things of life, that king who stood at the palace window looking forth as the cortège of the Pompadour passed by in a drizzling rain and remarked: “It is a wet day for the Marquise!”