Part II
THE COLLECTOR AND THE FAKER
CHAPTER XIII
COLLECTORS AND COLLECTIONS
Collectors and collections—Various kinds—Meaning of the word curieux—Various types of collectors: the artist, the scholar, the eclectic and the specialist—A large class of collectors as defined by La Bruyère—The ultra-modern collector—The art and curio market—The three stages of the collector’s career—The collector’s touch—The elasticity of prices and an opinion of C. T. Yerkes—Gersaint’s advice and Schlegel’s opinion—A Latin saying re-edited by Edmond Bonnaffé.
“La collection c’est l’homme,” a well-known French lover of art and first-rate connoisseur used to say. Nowadays this transformation of Buffon’s threadbare saying is only partially true. It would, perhaps, be more correct to put it in the past tense, as a new type of virtuoso has arisen. A collector of the most recent brand prefers to buy collections “ready-made.” Such collections all gathered in good order in the houses of these new collectors speak very eloquently of the owner’s financial power, but say nothing of his taste, ability, or love for the artistically fine and beautiful.
However, this being somewhat of a recent change brought about by casual circumstances with hardly any claim as an artistic phenomenon, this study can be confined for the present to that normal period, barely past, when the art and curio collector was really a “collector” and above all a lover of art as well as a passionate hunter after fine things. From the study of this semi-past world of art it will be easy to proceed to a comparative analysis of the up-to-date one, to the new species of collector who in no way comes under the definition “La collection c’est l’homme.”
In the foregoing review of collectors and collections, it has mostly been a question of art collectors, with only incidental reference to other kinds of art lovers. Curios, however, imply many other things. The French word curieux, which has often been used for lack of a better expression, has a wider meaning. The word curieux, which might be translated by the English word “curious,” without losing much of its meaning, may have originated in the Latin curiosis, though it is doubtful whether the Romans ever applied this word to connoisseurs of art or other collectors. The fact that the artistic world was then divided into lovers of the beautiful and faddists or fools, that erudites had not yet appeared, may have rendered new words of definitions useless. When speaking of his friend Statius as a connoisseur and virtuoso, Pliny uses the Greek word φιλόαλος (friend of the beautiful), a word that might really be used to define the true and genuine collector.
The French word curieux appears for the first time in a dictionary by Robert Estienne (1531) and is defined ung homme curieux d’avoir ou sçavoir choses antiques but later on, presumably from its probable Italian origin, the word acquires a wider sense, a sense that even finds an echo in Shakespeare, and so also the old meaning of gentilezza as used by Lorenzo Medici has a resonance, according to Lacroix du Maine, in the French gentillesses ou gentilles curiositez.
