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. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Mary Valencia. Set in Minion and Fournier types by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-0-300-20852-8 (hardback : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954819 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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.