Possession

 
 
Possession
The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present
by Erin Thompson
Yale University Press

2016

 

 

Possession is a university press book about people who collect Greek and Roman antiquities, based primarily on diaries and other documents written by collectors. Thompson claims that most accounts of collectors have taken non-collectors' judgments of them as accurate, and that hers is one of the first studies to look at how collectors account for themselves.

 
Beyond a general interest in understanding this group of people, over the course of the book Thompson becomes more and more interested in understanding them in a way that will lead to actionable strategies to get them to stop buying looted antiquities (and really, more or less stop buying antiquities altogether, since it's their demand that makes looting economically viable.) Because collectors are mostly rich, and already not deterred by laws, she looks for something analogous to the mostly successful attempt to switch big game hunters over to big game photography.

 
To the extent that collectors worry about looting, they tend to worry that beautiful objects will be damaged in the process. Thompson argues that the bigger worry is the one voiced by archaeologists - that understanding the human past requires finding lots of mundane objects laid out normally to see how they were used in relation to each other. This is something you can only do by digging very slowly and documenting everything. Digging quickly and chucking aside everything that isn't a masterpiece destroys an irreplacable record of everyday life in the past. Thompson's solution is to encourage rich antiqity lovers to fund and witness archaeological digs, channeling their love of the past into an activity that preserves the record instead of erasing it.

 
To get to that point, we follow historical collectors, from the wealthy Romans who collected Greek statues in order to fabricate historical lineages for themselves, to the English nobles establishing a spiritual lineage between their empire and Rome's, to the rich British and eventually American young people making the Grand Tour, seeing statues that reminded them of their childhood Classical education, and becoming lifelong afficianados. It has always been a prohibitively expensive hobby, and always the people who've wanted beautiful things from the past have ignored any laws intended to stop them, or even charge them a sales tax.

 
To read about some of these earlier collectors, it seems a wonder that there are any antiquities left. Thompson notes that our vision of what the past looks like has been affected by the restorations collectors pay for, and our knowledge of the source of various items influenced by the often made-up stories told by collectors who believe they have a special, almost psychic connection to the history of their objects. One guy bought a surprisingly intact statue of Hermaphrodite with three children, and had the kids and genitals removed to create a solo Venus. The kids of many collectors let statues get ruined, or use them for quotidian tasks, like a sarcophagus holding firewood, or serving as a cow trough. And the Bourbon Kings, who owned the ruins of Pompeii at one point, found giant wall-sized fresoes and had painting-sized fragments cut out to hang amongst their other art, and the rest destroyed to prevent any competitors from matching their prizes.

 
An interesting tour, and certainly one that puts the lie to the idea that collectors are somehow 'saving"'antiquities by buying them up and having them shipped away from their source. I believe Thompson's evaluation that these people do genuinely love their antiquities, and also that they often harm them and nearly always harm our record of the past by collecting them.