The concept of pĭ was coined in 17th-century Ming China to describe the mental condition of obsessive art collectors among the Mandarin class of scholarly bureaucrats. It signified a sort of illness, yet one whose sufferers were nonetheless admired for their chutzpah and nobility of vision. Obsessiveness, however peculiar, was deemed to be their saving grace, as opposed to those collectors driven by fashion and profit, who appeared greedy and vapid by comparison.
In A Noble Madness, the US-based British historian James Delbourgo examines this paradox as part of a bracingly internationalist inquiry into how the image of collectors, down the centuries, has radically evolved—if not necessarily improved. Delbourgo, a leading expert on the life and career of Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose eclectic collection helped to establish the British Museum, contends that “underneath their veneer of reason and civility, collectors are febrile, volatile and warped”.
He opens with the case of Gaius Verres, Sicily’s Roman governor in the first century BC, who was prosecuted by Marcus Tullius Cicero for indiscriminately looting the Mediterranean island. Cicero spoke of Verres’s “singular and furious madness”, noting that he was no collector, but rather plundered out of compulsion and was unable to appreciate anything he stole. Ancient looters eventually gave way to 16th-century idolators, such as Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, who assembled an enormous collection of holy relics that he believed would reduce his time in purgatory.
The shifting sands of collecting habits
What Delbourgo does so well is trace the shifting sands of collecting habits: each historical epoch has its own codes of behaviour, which are constantly in reaction to what has gone before. For instance, the devotion of Cardinal Albrecht gave way to the magus-collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Rudolf II of Habsburg, who rejected the austerity of the Reformation by dedicating themselves to objects aligned with esoteric knowledge, scientific curiosity and aesthetic transcendence. “Rudolf,” Delbourgo writes, “embodied the first stirrings of the modern idea that collectors are people who cannot face reality and prefer to lose themselves in a world of make-believe.”
But Delbourgo is as interested in the lives of fictional collectors as he is in those of flesh and blood. Ironically, several of the literary ones such as Sylvain Pons in Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Pons (1847) or Jonathan Oldbuck in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) have markedly more moral depth and heroic qualities than their real-life counterparts. The case of the Elgin Marbles is revelatory of a certain type of collector-looter who came to wield power over large swaths of the globe, placing the cultural treasures of others in museums as trophies of conquest and symbols of civilisational superiority.
This rotten state of affairs ushered in the first stirrings of the decadent collector, soon to be embodied in literature by Jean Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s dyspeptic À rebours (1884) and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous novel (1890). Channelling Wilde in all the best ways, Delbourgo captures this self-defeating form of collecting with impeccable sophistry: “The decadent thing to do was perish in a supernova of sophisticated spite.”
But occasionally one yearns for a little more depth in Delbourgo’s depiction of the tastemakers and trendsetting collectors of the 20th century whose names still resonate today. This is notably the case with female collectors such as Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim, who embraced Modern art at a time when their male counterparts were still hesitant or downright dismissive. What can we learn from their bold embrace of the new? And how has their legacy reshaped the collecting world today? It is hard to know, as Delbourgo has refrained from interviewing any contemporary billionaire collectors whose shadowy world remains conspicuously out of bounds.
Instead, Delbourgo relates an experience he had several years ago, at a symposium organised by the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, where he attended a talk by Evan Beard, an executive at U.S. Trust, part of America’s private wealth management operation. If you want to become a collector, Beard advised, “don’t buy what you love, buy what makes you slightly uncomfortable”. This bloodless approach to collecting, which contrasts so starkly with the passion-driven impulse of historical and fictional collectors, may make you wonder: if this is the endgame, was it worth all the trouble in the first place?
• James Delbourgo, A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting From Antiquity to Now, Quercus, 320pp, illustrated throughout, £25 (hb), published 12 August
• Tobias Grey is a UK-based writer and critic, focused on art, film and books
