A Cabinet of Rarities: Antiquarian Obsessions and the Spell of Death

Erik Desmazi�res is acknowledged as a contemporary master of the art of etching. With breathtaking virtuosity, he recreates interiors, cityscapes, landscapes and fantastical compositions from a Piranesian world. Any new work Desmazi�res produces is a bibliophile’s delight; and this book, the first in which he uses colour, reimagines the arcane world of the cabinet of curiosities: antiquarian collections of the recondite, rare and bizarre, which reminded the viewer of the vanity of earthly life. Patrick Mauri�s’s text is in three parts. The first locates Desmazi�res and his work in the long tradition of artist-printmakers; the second surveys the world of 17th-century antiquarianism and its intriguing cast of characters (John Evelyn, John Aubrey and, above all, Thomas Browne, plus many of their continental counterparts); and in the third Mauri�s examines today’s reawakened interest in cabinets of rarities and curiosities, and considers how a phenomenon once considered the preserve of specialists has entered the cultural mainstream.