Cabinets of Curiosities
Patrick Mauriès
|
| ‘Superb ... extremely erudite ... lavishly and beautifully illustrated, showing so many strange things that you can only marvel and stare at them in wide-eyed wonder’ | | – The Herald |
| ‘Captivating ... Just to read about the chaos of these cabinets, let alone look at the many beautiful images selected by Mauriès, is dizzying ... offers the kind of historical unity of which the early collectors, with their wonderful curiosity and lust for affinity, would have been proud’ | – The Times
Higher Education Supplement |
| '… a pleasure and an education in itself’ | | – Country Life |
‘Infinite riches in a little room’ – such were the cabinets of curiosities of the 17th century, the last period of history when man could aspire to know everything. This is one of those rare books that rescues a visually rich but little known subject from the past and shows its power to excite us today.
Once the concern only of scholars and art-historians, the cabinet of curiosities has, since the Surrealists, undergone an astonishing revival as an object of aesthetic pleasure, as well as emerging as a source of inspiration for interior designers and contemporary artists.
Unicorns’ horns, mermaids’ skeletons, minerals of breath-taking beauty, fossils, preserved animals and plants, sea-shells, monstrous births, insects in amber, wax effigies, death-masks, ivory carvings of incredible virtuosity, automata that imitated living things, clocks, musical instruments, lenses, celestial globes … all knowledge, the whole cosmos arranged…
In this spectacular and ingeniously erudite survey Patrick Mauriès traces the amazing history of these ‘rooms of wonders’. Not many survive, though there are pictorial records. But their contents still exist and are among the treasures of museums all over the world.
|
| |
For news of our new and forthcoming
publications please click here |
