A NOBLE MADNESS

Loving things.

Historian Delbourgo examines the changing role of the collector in our cultural imagination, from ancient looter to modern-day hoarder. Motivated by a desire for wealth, knowledge, prestige, and, not least, order, collectors have amassed objects such as artworks, scientific specimens, religious relics, books, and gems. Delbourgo traverses time and place to portray collectors’ roles: In premodern China, a collector was seen as a person of superior sophistication; in Korea, collecting was a path to attaining status. Some artifacts—religious relics, for example, or African art—have been sought for their spiritual or magical power. Romantics saw collecting as an expression of one’s inner self, an idea that persists, even as collecting has been associated with colonialism, looting, and profit. Collecting, Delbourgo asserts, also has been associated with mental illness. Fictional collectors, such as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, behave maniacally; Freud diagnosed the urge to collect as an expression of suppressed neuroses. Art collectors have been depicted variously as gloomy, gothic recluses, as figures associated with danger and unabated passion, and as libertines, while naturalists—Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alexander von Humboldt, to name a few—are more likely celebrated for their dogged pursuit of scientific specimens. Delbourgo casts a wide net to offer biographies of collectors such as Rudolf II, a Holy Roman emperor who aspired to assemble the world in miniature; Marie Antoinette, known as the “trinket queen”; Alfred Kinsey, who collected data about sex; and female collectors, notably, Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Peggy Guggenheim, motivated by a pursuit of beauty and “nourishment of the soul.” In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association included hoarding disorder in its updated manual. As Delbourgo amply reveals, however, the distinction between the ardent collector and the pathological hoarder is hardly clear.

A well-researched history of the passion to possess.