James Delbourgo, a professor of history at Rutgers University, New Jersey, says that his latest work is less a book about collecting than it is about the “cultural idea” of collecting. Does this need illuminating? Hasn’t collecting long been seen as one of the more refined arts? A way for the educated and wealthy to show off their learning, taste, urbanity? Collectors escape the shackles of the present, throw lifelines to a disappearing past, replenish the future. Sure, says Delbourgo. But he is also interested in telling the story of how – through the ages and across continents, in the popular and sometimes political imagination – collectors have been seen as introverts and perverts, as thieves and predators, as enemies of the humanity and humanism they espouse.
The major religions have always been suspicious about collecting, which they associate not with piety so much as idolatry. Why, their leaders thundered, would true believers worship objects rather than God? Artefacts – whether early coins featuring the image of Muhammad or golden and gemstone-encrusted statues of the Buddha – were inherently flawed for, as theologian John Calvin declared, “the finite cannot contain the infinite”. Yet images had the power to reach parts of illiterate societies that words alone never could. Churches invested in relics not only to attract donations and pilgrim-tourists, but to succour and solace parishioners in times of war or pestilence.
Within living memory, idolatry was one of the accusations levelled at collectors during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They were targeted as decadents, bourgeois, in thrall to a discredited past. Their homes were raided, their antiquities destroyed. Such scorn for history would have appalled the Chinese thinkers and poets who, in the 17th century, developed the concept of pi, whose shifting meanings include hobby, craving, eccentricity, fetishism. But if it was an illness, it was one to be celebrated. A true gentleman, wrote Yuan Hongdao, “worries only about having no obsessions”. Collectors, it was believed, were brave, deep, devotional.
Collecting is often assumed to be the preserve of men or man-boys. Notable exceptions include Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut and, in the 19th and 20th century, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Women collectors, in the very act of acquiring things, are sometimes said to be betraying their gentle, nurturing, “female” essence. Women collectors, in the very act of acquiring things, are sometimes said to be betraying their gentle, nurturing, “female” essence. In the 17th century, Queen Christina of Sweden sought to make Stockholm the “Athens of the north”, asked Descartes to set up a scientific academy in the city and was open to alchemy and mysticism. None of this counted for much – she wore, they all sniggered, men’s clothes. She even refused to marry. Whether it’s Catherine the Great or Marie Antoinette, women’s appetite for objects has been portrayed as unbecoming, carnal, obscene.
Delbourgo is at his liveliest when writing about collecting and empire. Those who sailed out into what they believed to be brave new worlds earned plaudits for advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Long before the advent of postcolonial studies, they were also seen as looters and frackers. By removing the Parthenon marbles, lamented Byron, Lord Elgin had riven “what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared”. For the explorer and biologist Alfred Wallace, “The wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute civilization”.
Every chapter of A Noble Madness is its own cabinet of curiosities. Collecting has itself been collected – by novelists such as Oscar Wilde, John Fowles, Orhan Pamuk; film-makers Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho; Sigmund Freud who thought collectors were displaced shaggers. Hokum? Delbourgo prefers such myths and storytelling to modern neuroscientists whose clinical explanations remind him of a lament by Charles Darwin: years of “grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”, wrote the naturalist, had led to “the atrophy of that part of his brain on which the higher tastes depend”.
• A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourg is published by Riverrun (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
