About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherThames & Hudson
ISBN-100500516340
ISBN-139780500516348
eBay Product ID (ePID)114206816
Product Key Features
LanguageEnglish
TopicMuseums, Tours, Points of Interest, General, Political, Travel, Art, Biography & Autobiography, Antiques & Collectibles
AuthorErik Desmazières
IllustratorYes
Dimensions
Item Length11.3 In.
Item Height0.7 In.
Item Weight27.4 Oz
Item Width8.5 In.
Additional Product Features
LCCN2012-932585
TitleLeadingA
Book TitleCabinet of Rarities : Antiquarian Obsessions and the Spell of Death
Dewey Decimal769.92
Intended AudienceTrade
SynopsisThe manifestation of a collector's appetite for discovering and mastering the world--represented by singular items of natural history, geology, art, or relics--cabinets of curiosities and rarities became popular in the Renaissance and were precursors to the modern museum. Largely inspired by seventeenth-century scientist and antiquary Sir Thomas Browne, whose esoteric writings have long appealed to scholars, this rare new work is a bibliophile's delight. Erik Desmazi res's contemporary etchings present a cabinet of rarities portraying a collection of the recondite, rare, and bizarre, complete with emblems of the vanity of earthly life and intimations of mortality. Death and decay are favorite subjects: a skull recalls depictions of Sir Thomas Browne's own, disinterred and displayed in a local museum until the 1920s. These abstruse objects and specters of death, subject matter once considered the preserve of specialists, have entered the cultural mainstream and have found a broad popular audience., For bibliophiles, print collectors,and connoisseurs, and anyonewhose imagination is fired bythe macabre and the arcane:contemporary etchings recreatinginteriors, studios,cityscapes, landscapes, andfantastical compositionsfrom a Piranesian world, With breathtaking virtuosity and a unique, dreamlike vision, Érik Desmazières - a master of contemporary printmaking - re-creates interiors, cityscapes and fantastical compositions. For this book - the first to include the artist's rare work in colour - Desmazières has delved deep into the arcane theme of cabinets of curiosities. Taking as his starting point the melancholy musings of the seventeenth-century antiquary Sir Thomas Browne, he has reinterpreted these shadowy collections of the recondite, rare and bizarre - precious corals, shrunken heads and magical artefacts - as a series of meditations on the vanity of earthly life. Death and decay are never far below the surface, as a depiction of Sir Thomas Browne's own skull, disinterred and displayed in a museum until the 1920s, reminds us. The erudite text by Patrick Mauriès traces the preoccupations of Browne and his fellow collectors through history, showing how abstruse objects and spectres of death - subject matter once considered the preserve of specialists - have now entered the cultural mainstream. Rich in atmosphere, refreshingly strange and exquisitely produced, A Cabinet of Rarities is a bibliophilic treasure for anyone whose imagination is fired by the esoteric and macabre.
Publication Year2012
Dewey Edition23
FormatHardcover
LC Classification NumberNE2049
Number of Pages110 pages
