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A Cabinet of Rarities: Antiquarian Obsessions and the Spell of Death

The manifestation of a collector's appetite for discovering and mastering the world;represented by singular items of natural history, geology, art, orrelics&cabinets of curiosities and rarities became popular in the Renaissance and were precursors to the modern museum.

Largely inspired by seventeenth-century scientist and antiquary Sir Thomas Browne, whose esoteric writings have long appealed to scholars, this rare new work is a bibliophile's delight. Erik Desmazières's contemporary etchings present a cabinet of rarities portraying a collection of the recondite, rare, and bizarre, complete with emblems of the vanity of earthly life and intimations of mortality. Death and decay are favorite subjects: a skull recalls depictions

of Sir Thomas Browne&'s own, disinterred and displayed in a local museum until the 1920s. These abstruse objects and specters of death, subject matter once considered the preserve of specialists, have entered the cultural mainstream

and have found a broad popular audience.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 110
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780500516348
  • Genres
  • art, history
  • Release date
  • 2012