Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present

206 Pages·2016·4.77 MB·English

by  Erin Thompson

POSSESSION
Erin L. Thompson
Possession
The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity
to the Present
Copyright © 2016 by Erin L. Thompson.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-0-300-20852-8 (hardback : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Powers and Perils of the Antique: The Birth of Collecting
2 Collecting Identities
3 “By Means of a Little Castration”: Restoration and Manipulation
4 Irresistible Forgeries
5 The Privileges of Lovers: Erotic Connections with Antiquities
6 Collecting Others
7 The History of Looting and Smuggling—and What They Destroy
8 Collectors’ Failed Justifications for Looting and Smuggling
9 Conclusion: Collecting to Save the Past
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T hank you to my colleagues at the City University of New York for
supporting this project with a research grant and, more importantly,
through discussion and encouragement. Thank you to the librarians in the
Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College for working tirelessly to field my
endless interlibrary loan requests. Thank you to my research assistant, Emogene
Cataldo, for mastery of microfiche. A very large thank you to Adrienne Mayor
for suggesting that a paper she heard might deserve to be a book, and to Sandy
Dijkstra, the fabulous agent we now share. Thank you to my editors at Yale
University Press, Eric Brandt and Steve Wasserman. I would also like to thank
the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the New York Public Library,
the British Museum, the Tate Britain, Columbia University’s Avery Library,
Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the Merseyside Museum,
Liverpool, Musée du Louvre, and The J. Paul Getty Museum, sources of
invaluable information on collecting and collectors. Thank you to Sara and
Noah, for reading drafts, feeding me dinners, and tolerating my tendency to
discuss the minutia of eighteenth-century export laws at said dinners. And thank
you to Ashur, who can truly say, as Montaigne claimed, “I was familiar with the
affairs of Rome long before I was with those of my own house.”
Introduction
C ollecting is a curious behavior. Almost everyone has formed a collection,
however small. Especially as children, we accumulate objects whose
uselessness is rivaled only by the fascination we feel while sorting,
touching, and contemplating them: seashells, rocks, ticket stubs. There are
collectors for every category of object, natural and artificial, from Fabergé eggs
to nail clippings. We find such collections throughout human history, and
beyond humankind as well—certain animals also form collections.
And yet, for all its universality, the collecting impulse is surprisingly little
studied or understood. We know more about the motivations of bower birds than
human collectors. Male bower birds collect twigs, pebbles, flowers, and other
brightly colored accoutrements to build a “bower” structure around their nest
site. They happily seize on and use some of the items, such as film canisters,
discarded by naturalists who observe them. They indignantly remove other items
that meddling naturalists add to their bowers in their absence if they do not fit
with what is evidently a strict decorative scheme. Female bower birds tour
nesting sites and select their mates based on their bowers. The ways of human
collectors, by contrast, are much more mysterious. The attraction of mates is
hardly the usual result.
This book studies the motivations and self-perceptions of those who have
formed private collections of Greek and Roman antiquities. Although I cover the
history of the subject, starting with the Romans, who were the first to covet and
display Greek masterpieces in their homes, my reason for writing is a
contemporary one. Investigating the motives of antiquities collectors can help
stop the ongoing looting and destruction of archeological sites that currently
supplies the market for collectible antiquities. A remarkably consistent set of
motivations and beliefs has driven antiquities collectors throughout history. We
must understand these motivations and beliefs so that they can be rechanneled
into behaviors that will provide collectors with what they crave without putting
the heritage of the world as a whole at risk.
In this book, the term “collectors” means those who form private collections
of antiquities, excluding artists, scholars, dealers, or those collecting for public
museums other than museums they themselves plan to found. “Antiquities”
museums other than museums they themselves plan to found. “Antiquities”
describes works of art produced by the ancient Greeks and Romans and found
within the modern boundaries of Greece and Italy. These are artificial limits;
similar stories could be told about artifacts from elsewhere in the Greek and
Roman world.
Certain aspects of the history of the collecting of antiquities have received
much scholarly attention. Thanks to inventory lists, household expense records,
architectural plans, and other archival records, we know many practical facts
about most major private collections of antiquities: how much collectors paid for
them, from whom they purchased them, where in their homes or private
museums they displayed them. Yet, answering the questions of who, when, and
where brings us very little closer to answering the question of why.
Part of the reason that we have made so little progress here is that observers
of collecting have been unusually consistent in assuming that they already know
the answer. Antiquities collectors, you will read in many a scholarly text, collect
out of a desire for social prestige and have little true appreciation for the
beauties of what they own. This analysis is reductionist, dismissive, and not
sufficient—it does not explain, for instance, why the collector acquires
antiquities and not real estate or horses or contemporary art, all of which could
also display social prestige. And this scholarly perspective is not that far
removed from the satirical criticisms levied against collectors since Roman
times, which paint them as greedy, effeminate, stupid, uncultured, arriviste,
sexually incontinent, or all of the above.
So, what does motivate the collector? Finding out is crucial, because
collections can shape our perception of the world, knowledge of its past, and
course of its future. Fortunately, collectors themselves have left us plenty of
information to help explain what turn out to be very complex motivations. For
example, J. Paul Getty, who made himself a billionaire through investments in
oil and spent large portions of this fortune on art, including antiquities, wrote
and spoke extensively about his reasons for collecting—which included a belief
that he was a reincarnation of the emperor Hadrian. From Romans writing letters
about their worries that they may have been fooled by forgeries of Greek art, to
medieval churchmen chronicling their cautious admiration of the suspect
beauties of a statue of Venus, to Enlightenment noblemen posing with their
prized collections for portraits, to contemporary collectors dictating heartfelt
introductions to exhibitions of their collections, there are many other instances
of collectors speaking for themselves. This book is the first to collect and
analyze these records, as found in collectors’ letters, memoirs, diaries,
catalogues of collections, and other publications and archival records.
The study of collectors’ self-perceptions requires some caution. Those who
are inclined to believe that collectors’ true motivation is social prestige will
likely claim that any other explanations offered by collectors are false defenses
intended to cover up the unflattering true causes of their behavior. I have taken
collectors’ writings with many grains of salt, for example, distrusting those
collectors who describe one set of motivations but whose actual purchases and
other behaviors contradict their statements. I rely on texts, such as letters to
dealers and other collectors, in which collectors have little need to disguise their
motivations. I also avoided retelling anecdotes about collectors of the type
described by the Italians as se non è vero, è ben trovato, on the theory that such
colorful stories, unless verified by the collector himself, are likely to be
inventions. Following the same principle, I have not relied unquestioningly on
the descriptions of collectors’ motivations posited by biographers or curators
writing introductions to exhibits of private collections. Flattery often has too
much free play in such compositions.
Regrettably but necessarily, this reliance on collectors’ own words leaves out
the many collectors whose voices left no record. Freud, for example, had a study
crammed with small antiquities, and wrote that he had “actually read more
archeology than psychology.”1 Freud traveled with a selection of antiquities:
“my old and grubby gods . . . [who] take part in the work as paperweights for
my manuscripts.”2 Yet, Freud never wrote more than brief mentions of his
antiquities and never analyzed his own reasons for collecting.3
The book proceeds both chronologically and thematically, examining the
history of collecting from the Romans who took Greek art as spoils of war, to
the eighteenth-century Grand Tourists who accumulated life-sized souvenirs of
their travels, to the contemporary collectors who pay millions of dollars for
pieces of the past. The first chapters focus on different types of uses to which
collectors have put their collected antiquities, explaining how these uses have
both literally and figuratively shaped our understanding of the ancient world.
The concluding chapters then look at where collectors get antiquities, arguing
that the enormous prices that collectors pay spur looting on such an
unprecedented scale that it threatens to obliterate the past.
The history of the private collecting of antiquities has forged a strong yet
paradoxical link between the exaltation and the destruction of ancient art. This
book will ask if this link can ever be broken.
1
CHAPTER
The Powers and Perils of the Antique
The Birth of Collecting
C ollectors and their critics have always believed that classical art has special
powers: to legitimate rule, to create identities, to express wealth, to
enervate warriors, or to possess the collector—either metaphorically or
literally—with the spirit of the past. From the first, collectors of Greek art were
eager to capture the essence of the Greeks along with the physical remains of
their culture.
The Attalid dynasty is the first example of this type of collecting.1 The
kingdom was founded upon an act of treason. After the death of Alexander the
Great, one of his generals left a treasure of 9,000 talents in the care of his
treasurer Philetaerus in the small but strongly defended hilltop town of
Pergamum, on the southern coast of modern-day Turkey. Philetaerus promptly
betrayed his master. He locked the town gates and used the treasure to establish
his own kingdom. Although a eunuch, Philetaerus founded a dynasty by leaving
the kingdom to his nephew, Eumenes.
Attalus I, who inherited the kingdom from Eumenes in 241 BCE, made the
kingdom great by means of a strategic alliance with the growing superpower of
Rome. He and his son, Eumenes II, worked hard to ensure their dynasty’s place
in history with large art commissions, such as the Great Altar of Pergamum, now
in Berlin. Less well known but just as important were their efforts to acquire as
many artworks as possible from the high period of Greek art. They displayed
these works, already several centuries old, in monumental palace, library, and
religious complexes.
They acquired antiquities by various means. Attalus I purchased the art-rich
island of Aegina, which lies just off of the Greek mainland, and then denuded its
towns and sanctuaries of artistic masterpieces to decorate Pergamum.2 He also
took advantage of the relative disinterest of the Romans of that period in art.