A Prince of Print-Collectors: Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin (1600-1681)
By LOUIS R. METCALFE
The French make a fine distinction between three varieties of that very special individual to whom we refer in a general way as “a collector.” They have always been authorities on that subject and one of them has said: “On est amateur par goût, connaisseur par éducation, curieux par vanité.” While another adds: “Ou par spéculation.” By “collector” we simply mean a person who has formed the habit of acquiring the things in which he is particularly interested, and these in as many varieties as possible. It implies neither an artistic pursuit nor a deep knowledge of the subject. By curieux, however, is meant, as a rule, an amateur, a man of taste who collects things which pertain to art exclusively; he is in most cases a connaisseur, and always an enthusiast.
Paris, the home of taste, has never been that of the curieux more so than at the present day, when, it seems, every one who can afford a rent of over four thousand francs has a hobby of some sort and is a mad collector. A general history of the weakness for things either beautiful or odd or rare, or merely fashionable, would be both voluminous and chaotic, if a distinction were not made between that which pertained to art and that which did not. A complete description of the latter, a hopelessly heterogeneous mass, would make an amusing volume, for there is no end to the variety of things in which vanity and folly have caused human beings to become interested to the point of collecting in large numbers.
George IV collected saddles; the Princess Charlotte and many others, shells. Tulips were so madly sought after in Holland that one root was exchanged for 460 florins, together with a new carriage, a pair of horses, and a set of harness. Shop-bills and posters have been the specialty of many, while thousands of persons have collected postage-stamps and coins. A Mr. Morris had so many snuff-boxes that it was said he never took two pinches of snuff out of the same box. A Mr. Urquhart collected the halters with which criminals had been hanged; and another enthusiast, the masks of their faces. Suett, a comedian, collected wigs, and another specialist owned as many as fifteen hundred skulls, Anglo-Saxon and Roman. If there have been men who have shown a propensity to collect wives, Evelyn tells us in his diary:
“In 1641 there was a lady in Haarlem who had been married to her twenty-fifth husband, and, having been left a widow, was prohibited from marrying in future; yet it could not be proved that she had ever made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her divers times to trouble.”
Although we much regret that such an intensely interesting work as a Comprehensive History of Collecting has never been written, we realize that a mere description of rare and beautiful objects would be unsatisfactory as long as we did not know their history and the way in which they had been gathered together. It is the soul of the collector which we should like to see laid bare. Was his work a labor of vanity or one of love? Were his possessions mere playthings, speculation, to him, or did they represent treasures of happiness greater than all the gold in Golconda?
Without a doubt, it is one thing to collect what is highly prized on all sides, with large means at one’s disposal, and the constant advice of experts, and quite another to search patiently oneself for things which the general public has not yet discovered, and then to acquire them with difficulty.
Who shall know with what admirable zeal some collectors have made themselves authorities on the things which they loved? with what untiring energy they have sifted for years masses of trash in the hope of finding the hidden pearl? Who can tell the inner history of the auction-room, the heart-beats of those who were after the jewel which no one else seemed to have noticed, the sacrifices which many with a slender purse have made in order to secure the precious “find,” and lastly the enjoyment which they ever afterward derived from its possession? Many of the great French collections of the last century were made in this spirit: they were begun with a modest outlay and devoted to things which, at that time, no one else wanted. I know of one of the first collectors of Eastern Art in the nineteenth century, who at one time had greatly to reduce his household in order to satisfy his passion for Japanese vases; and of another wealthy enthusiast who would travel third-class to London to secure an old Roman bronze. The history of such collections becomes that of human beings for whom life is nothing without beauty, and it is too personal to be recorded. The collector will seldom believe that his enthusiasm can be understood by others besides himself: maybe, also, he would be unwilling to reveal the more or less innocent subterfuges to which he had recourse in order to acquire more than one of his treasures.
The American chapter of such a history is the most recent one, and the world is now watching its development with bated breath. The art of the Old World is being imported by the ship-load; fortunes are paid for single paintings, while the paneled wainscots of French châteaux, the ceilings of Italian palaces, the colonnades of their gardens, and the tapestries of the Low Countries, not to mention a hundred varieties of objets d’art, are constantly wending their way to the treasure-houses—still in course of construction—of the New World. All this is taking place to the indignation of Europeans and the æsthetes who consider such a radical change of background a desecration, and do not stop to think that this transplantation is hardly more unnatural than the sight of the Elgin marbles in foggy London, or the winged bulls of Ecbatana in the halls of the Louvre.
So long as we as a nation will learn a much-needed lesson and thereby greatly improve our taste, let all honor and glory be given to those who have been responsible for such valuable acquisitions. Our American collections already contain many “gems of purest ray serene,” and who will dare say that they are not destined to become in time worthy successors of the famous ones which have preceded them?
From the writings of Pliny and other classic historians, and from several catalogues and rare documents which have come down to us from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we have abundant proof that there never was a time when works of art were not treasured. Cicero, Atticus, and Varro collected writings, and the libraries of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and that of Epaphroditus of Chæronea, which contained thirty-two thousand manuscripts, were famous. Hannibal was a lover of bronzes: it was he who owned the little Hercules of Lysippus which the master himself had presented to Alexander the Great and which afterward became the property of Sulla.
Both Pompey and Julius Cæsar possessed splendid masterpieces of that Greek art which was so highly prized in Italy. The Venus of the Hermitage comes from Cæsar’s gallery, and the Jupiter of the Louvre from that of Antony; while the Faun with the Child, and the Borghese vase, now treasured in the Louvre, were once among the possessions of Sallust in his palace on the Quirinal. Not only sculpture was collected in those times, for we also hear of the tapestries of Saurus, valued at twenty millions in the currency of the day; the jewelry of Verres, reputed the finest in existence; the priceless crystals of Pollio; and the two thousand vases of precious stone owned by Mithridates, King of Pontus.
Throughout the Middle Ages the trésor of the kings and the most powerful nobles was in reality their collection. That of Dagobert was the result of four Italian conquests. The inventory of the jewels of the Duc d’Anjou, son of John the Good, contains 796 numbers, while his brother, the Duc de Berry, had a passion for reliquaries, old church ornaments, and rare manuscripts which he caused to be mounted like jewels. The library of Charles V and his trésor were valued at twenty millions of francs, and the collection of curiosities of Ysabeau de Bavière had not its equal. It contained, among other things, an ivory box in which was kept the cane with which Saint Louis used to flagellate himself. The Dukes of Burgundy for centuries were the greatest collectors of richly inlaid armor. And what of the treasures of Jacques Cœur, the great banker of Charles VII? With his fleet of trading-vessels and his many banking-houses he secured the pick of the market. We know that his silverware was piled up to the ceiling in the vaults of his palace at Bourges.
In the Gazette des Beaux-Arts for the year 1869 we read a description of the home of Jacques Duchié, a famous art collector who flourished during the first half of the fifteenth century. In the courtyard were peacocks and a variety of rare birds. In the first room was a collection of paintings and decorated signs; in the second, all kinds of musical instruments—harps, organs, viols, guitars, and psalterions. In the third was a great number of games, cards and chessmen; and in the adjoining chapel, rare missals on elaborately carved stands. In the fourth room the walls were covered with precious stones and sweet-smelling spices, while on those of the next was hung a great variety of furs. From these rooms one proceeded to halls filled with rich furniture, carved tables, and decorated armor.
The Renaissance was the Golden Age of Collectors. What could have withstood the influence of that tremendous movement? The art of Italy and the magnificence of the nobility and the princes of the Church shed, like the Augustan Age, a golden glamour over civilization.
The Médicis set the example, and they were closely followed by the Sforzas, the Farneses, and the Gonzagas. The patronage of the Fine Arts was on such a scale, and the rivalry among the collectors so keen, that in 1515 there were in Rome thirty-nine cardinals who had veritable museums for palaces. It was for Agostino Chigi that Raphael decorated that Farnesina Villa in which such treasures were stored, and for whom, later, he designed those plates on which parrots’ tongues were served to Leo X.
What a rage for beauty there was when Baldassarre Castiglione advised all the sons of noble families to study painting, in order that they might become better judges of architecture, sculpture, vases, medals, intaglios, and cameos. What a madness for antiques, when Cardinal San Giorgio sent back to Michelangelo his “Amorino” because he considered it too modern. Would that we could follow the vicissitudes through which went the great collections of the day—the drawings of Vasari, the books of Aldus and Pico della Mirandola, the armor of Cellini, the portraits of Paolo Giovio and the medals of Giulio Romano!
Certain is it that many of their treasures eventually crossed the Alps. It was after Charles VIII had shown to the élite of his nation “the remnants of antiquity gilded by the sun of Naples and of Rome” that the French Renaissance, already well on its way, received new inspiration, and that the French collectors renewed their activity. Judging by the fabulous accounts given by the country-folk, the contents of many a turreted castle on the Loire must have been wonderful, indeed. Following the lead of Francis I, who had his library, his pavillon d’armes, and his cabinet de curiosités, and the example of Catherine de Médicis, who had brought from Italy many of her family’s treasures, the leading nobles, like Georges d’Amboise in his Château de Gaillon, collected beautiful things with admirable catholicity. It was not only books in sumptuous bindings which were sought after by Louis XII and the Valois, Diane de Poitiers, Queen Margot, Amyot, and de Thou, but art in every form. In the case of Grolier himself, are we not told by Jacques Strada, in his “Epithome du Thrésor des Curiositez,” that “great was the number of objects of gold, silver, and copper in perfect condition, and remarkable the variety of statues in bronze and marble, which his agents were collecting for him all over the world”?
Most significant is the inventory of the collection of Florimond Robertet, the able treasurer of the royal finances under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, which was made in 1532 by Michelle de Longjumeau, his widow. Never was a catalogue such a labor of love as this one. It is a detailed description of the entire contents of a museum on which a great financier spent his entire fortune; it is full of significant touches concerning the customs of the time and the origin and use of the objects described; and it bears witness to the great enjoyment which both husband and wife derived from their treasures throughout their lifetime. There were many jewels and some pear-shaped pearls of great size, silver andirons, thirty sets of silks and tapestries, bronzes and ivories. Among the paintings and sculpture were a canvas and a statue by Michelangelo. The porcelain was the first brought to France from China, and there was much pottery from Turkish lands and Flanders, French faïence, Italian majolica, church ornaments, precious books, and four hundred pieces of Venetian glass, “gentillisez des plus jolies gayetez que les verriers sauraient inventer.”
It was the religious wars of the end of the century which brought French collecting to a stop. Constant strife and persecution discouraged the last artists of the Renaissance, ruined many a noble family, and scattered the contents of their palaces. Not until years afterward, during the seventeenth century, was it taken up again; then it was to reach great brilliancy during the reign of Louis XIV. The leading families of France began to rebuild their collections when Henry IV and his favorite, Gabrielle d’Estrées, indulged their fondness for medals, cameos, and intaglios, and Marie de Médicis had brought from Tuscany those paintings which she considered such an indispensable luxury. In after years Louis XIII collected armor; Anne of Austria, delicate bindings; and Richelieu, finely chased silverware. And when Louis XIV began to reign, Paris was the proud center of the collecting world. From this time on we have full records of the treasures amassed by many people of taste and culture and we are able to follow them into the following century, no matter how often they change hands—this, thanks to specialists like Felibien and Germain Brice and the thousand references to art in the memoirs of the time. In 1673 there were in Paris eighty-five important art collectors who owned among them seventy-three libraries, and twenty years later this number had increased to one hundred and thirty-four, a remarkable development for such a short space of time.
The greatest example was set by Cardinal Mazarin and Fabri du Peiresc. The wily Italian who had succeeded Richelieu gave as much time to his collections as to the ship of state, and his fellow-grafter, Nicolas Fouquet, treasurer of the kingdom, was allowed to make himself the most powerful man in France just as long as he was able to supply his Eminence with the millions he was so constantly in need of for the army and his gold-threaded tapestries and busts of Roman emperors. Just before his death. Mazarin had himself carried through a gallery lined with 400 marbles, nearly 500 canvases (among them seven Raphaels), and 50,000 volumes, while he kept weeping and exclaiming: “Faudra-t-il quitter tout cela?” In the south of France, Fabri du Peiresc, great savant and collector, had agents in constant quest of rarities. It is related that “no ship entered a port in France without bringing for his collections some rare example of the fauna and flora of a distant country, some antique marble, a Coptic, Arab, Chinese, Greek, or Hebrew manuscript, or some fragment excavated from Asia or Greece.”
By this time there was a new fine art to be collected seriously—that of Engraving. To the masterpieces of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, and Marcantonio, now over a century old, had succeeded the spirited etchings of Callot. It was he who first popularized the art in France and paved the way for the enthusiastic appreciation of Morin, Mellan, and Nanteuil. The school of engravers established by Colbert at the Gobelins made their art rank in importance with Painting and Sculpture, and their work won such popular favor that many engravers became publishers, and did a great business selling their prints and those of their pupils to the leading collectors. The first man of taste to make a serious collection of engravings was Claude Maugis, Abbé de Saint Ambroise, almoner to the Queen, Marie de Médicis. He spent forty years making a collection which at his death was sold to Charles Delorme, that physician-in-ordinary to Henry IV and Louis XIII of whom Callot has made such an interesting little portrait. It was when the first part of the Delorme Collection and that of a Sieur de Kervel had been added to his own possessions by the Abbé de Marolles that there was begun the greatest collection of prints and drawings ever assembled.
Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin, was one of the most picturesque figures of the seventeenth century. He was born in Touraine in 1600, and died in 1681, the son of the gallant Claude de Marolles, maréchal de camp in the army of Louis XIII, who had won a famous duel fought in the presence of two armies in the War of the Ligue. His life was indeed a peaceful one. At the age of twenty-six, after having pursued a complete course of studies, he was presented by Richelieu with the abbey of Villeloin in Touraine, and for the remainder of his days he drew its income, cultivated the most interesting people in France, translated the classics, wrote his memoirs, and collected prints as no one ever did before him, or after. Truly, an ideal existence!
Although he tells us that at the age of nine he decorated the walls of his bedroom with prints given him by a Carthusian monk, we know that for the first half of his life the Abbé de Villeloin did little more than collect friends. This must have given him little trouble, for his rank gained him admission to the entire nobility, and his appreciation of literature and the fine arts enabled him to carry on a friendly intercourse with the best-known artists and connoisseurs. During this intercourse there was a constant exchange of gifts; in fact, to receive presents seemed to have been the Abbé’s object in life. In his “Memoirs” there are one hundred and fifty pages devoted to a complete enumeration of all the persons who have presented him with a gift, or “honored him extraordinarily by their civility,” and the list includes the best-known personages of the day.
What did de Marolles give them in return, besides the pleasure of his company and the charm of his appreciation? A mass of bad translations of the classics: that was the great weakness of the Abbé de Villeloin. Chapelain, the poet, complained of it in a curious letter to Heinsius, saying:
“That fellow has vowed to translate all the classic authors, and has almost reached the end of his labors, having spared neither Plautus nor Lucretius nor Horace nor Virgil nor Juvenal nor Martial, nor many others. Your Ovid and Seneca have as yet fought him off, but I do not consider them saved, and all the mercy they can expect is that of the Cyclops to Ulysses—to be devoured last.” That Chapelain was not the only one who did not appreciate the literary talent of the Abbé, and that he often found difficulty in finding publishers for his translations, is admitted by de Marolles himself when, in his poem on “The City of Paris,” he says:
“J’ai perdu des amis par un rare caprice
Quand je leur ai donné des livres que j’ai faits
Comme gens offensés, sans pardonner jamais
Bien qu’on n’ait point blessé leur méchant artifice.”
But it is not as a man of letters that de Marolles interests us: it is as a great lover of the art of Engraving and the greatest collector of prints in history. Not until he had reached the age of forty-four did he begin to collect them systematically. Then he purchased the first part of the Delorme Collection for one thousand louis d’or, the prints owned by Kervel, and those of several other small collectors. His activity was so great that nine years later, in his memoirs, he was able to refer to this collection as follows:
“God has given me grace to devote myself to pictures without superstition, and I have been able to acquire a collection numbering more than 70,000 engravings of all subjects. I began it in 1644, and have continued it with so much zeal, and with such an expense for one not wealthy, that I can claim to possess some of the work of all the known masters, painters as well as engravers, who number more than 400.”
He further adds:
“I have found that collecting such things was more suited to my purse than collecting paintings, and more serviceable to the building up of a library. Had we in France a dozen such collectors among the nobility, there would not be enough prints to satisfy them all, and the works of Dürer, Lucas, and Marcantonio, for which we now pay four and five hundred écus when in perfect condition, would be worth three times that amount.... It seems to me that princes and noblemen who are collecting libraries should not neglect works of this kind, as long as they contain so much information on beautiful subjects; but I know of no one who has undertaken to do this except for medals, flowers, architecture, machines, and mathematics.”
The collection of the Abbé de Marolles had become so famous by 1666, that Colbert, after having had it examined and appraised by Felibien and Pierre Mignard, advised Louis XIV to purchase it for the royal library. The deed was signed in 1667, and in the following year the Abbé de Villeloin received from the royal treasury the sum of twenty-six thousand livres ($25,000) for what was described in a seal-colored document as “un grand nombre d’estampes des plus grands maîtres de l’antiquité.” Let us see what this meant.
De Marolles tells us himself, in his catalogue of 1666, that his collection consisted of 123,400 original drawings and prints, the work of over 6000 artists, and that it was contained in 400 large and 141 small volumes. As to the variety of subjects represented, it had no end: it included, for instance, landscapes, views of cities, architecture, fountains, vases, statues, flowers, gardens, jewelry, lacework, machines, grotesques, animals, costumes, decoration, anatomy, dances, comedies, jousts, heraldry, games, heroic fables, religious subjects, massacres, tortures, and over 10,000 portraits.
In describing his collection to Colbert, the Abbé made especial note of his greatest treasures as follows:
“Leonardo da Vinci. His work is in 5 pieces.
“Anthony van Dyck. There are 210 plates after his work, of which 14 are etched by his own hand.
“Marcantonio from Bologna, that excellent engraver who has done such beautiful work after Dürer, Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, is the greatest of all engravers, and the one whose works are the most sought after. I own 570 of them, in two volumes.
“Andrea and Benedetto Mantegna. The work of the former is in 104 pieces, that of the latter in 74, all rare, making 178 pieces in all, some of which are engraved by Marcantonio.
“Lucas van Leyden, excellent painter and engraver, of whom I have collected in one volume all the works engraved both on copper and on wood, besides 25 drawings in pen and pencil from his own hand, all very singular. I have 180 of these engravings, many in duplicate, all of great beauty, among them the portrait of Eulenspiegel, unique in France, the other having been sold more than twelve years ago for 16 louis d’or. Among the woodcuts, the Kings of Israel are here done in chiaroscuro, and unique in this state.
“Albert Dürer. One folio volume, bound in vellum, contains 12 portraits of the artist by various masters; 15 drawings by his own hand, which are singular and priceless; his three plates on brass [sic], his six etched plates, and all his copper engravings in duplicate, with three impressions of Maximilian’s sword-hilt, all having been collected by the Abbé de Saint Ambroise, almoner of Queen Marie de Médicis....
“Rhinbrand [sic]. The work of this Dutch painter and etcher consists of many prints, of which I have collected 224, among which are portraits and fancy subjects most curious.”
He further adds that he possesses 192 original crayon portraits by Lagneau, a successor of the Clouets, and 50 by Dumonstier, and that the prints of the old masters of Italy, Germany, and Flanders are contained in 19 folio volumes.
After this enormous collection had passed into the hands of the King, the Abbé de Marolles was engaged to catalogue and classify it, and also to superintend the binding of its 541 volumes. For this he received on two occasions a payment of 1200 livres. The binding was done in full levant morocco, decorated with the royal arms, Louis’s monogram, and richly tooled borders; for this purpose 500 green and 1200 crimson skins had been specially imported from the East.
Our indefatigable collector had hardly parted with the result of the labor of twenty-two years when he began the formation of a second collection. To the second part of the Delorme Collection which he then purchased were added the prints of MM. Odespunck and la Reynie, the collection of M. Petau, who had made a specialty of portraits, and that of the Sieur de la Noue, which contained a great number of original drawings. We know very little about this second collection of the Abbé de Marolles, except that when it was catalogued in 1672 it was contained in 237 folios. What became of it has never been ascertained; in all probability it found its way into the print-cabinets of the many amateurs of the end of the century. It is evident that he wished to dispose of it, probably for the purpose of starting a third collection, for we have a letter on the subject addressed to M. Brisacier, secrétaire des commandements de la Reine, of whom Masson made that famous engraved plate known as “The Gray-haired Man.” In it de Marolles describes his second collection as being hardly less important than the one he had previously sold to the King, and as containing a great number of masterpieces which were unique.
Not satisfied with such extensive researches in the realm of art, the Abbé de Villeloin decided to record all his information on the subject, and in the spring of 1666 announced the title of a colossal work on which he was engaged as: “Une histoire très ample des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, architectes, ingenieurs, maîtres-écrivains, orfèvres, menuisiers, brodeurs, jardiniers et autres artisans industrieux, où il est fait mention de plus de dix mille personnes, aussi bien que d’un très grand nombre d’ouvrages considérables, avec une description exacte et naīve des plus belles estampes ou de celles qui peuvent servir à donner beaucoup de connaissances qui seraient ignorées sans cela.” This work was, unfortunately, never published, and its manuscript has never been found; it would have been a wonderful compendium of French art during the seventeenth century, and would have given us much precious information concerning a number of prominent engravers of whom so little is known to-day.
All that remains of it is the summary, written in bad verse and published under the title of “Le livre des peintres et des graveurs.” It is a curious little book, containing little more than the names of thousands of artists who were obscure in their day and who are now completely forgotten. To many of them, however, and particularly to the most prominent, are affixed such descriptive little touches, that what would otherwise have been a monotonous pattern becomes an original piece of historical ornament.
As to the “Memoirs” of the Abbé de Marolles, they possess the same defect as many other autobiographies of the time: they were published too soon, and they prove how anxious the author was to witness the sensation he thought he would make. In this case they were published in 1653, fourteen years before the Abbé had sold his first collection, and they tell us little more than that he possessed a very extended circle of acquaintances who thought the world of him on account of his patronage of the fine arts and his literary talent. It is evident that he included himself among his most sincere admirers, and that he regarded the friendship of such a charming woman as Louise-Marie de Gonzague, who later became Queen of Poland, and the incense which all the engravers in France ostentatiously scattered before him, as both natural and deserved. Claude Mellan, Poilly, and Robert Nanteuil were on particularly friendly terms with him, each in turn engraving his portrait from life, the last with such delicacy and finish that that plate ranks among his most successful portraits. Mellan, furthermore, engraved the portraits of his parents, Claude de Marolles and Agatha Castiglione.
The tastes and the mania for collecting of the Abbé de Villeloin were so well known that it is not impossible that it was he of whom La Bruyère was thinking when, in his famous “Caractères,” he gives the following description of a collector:
“‘You wish to see my prints,’ says Democenes, and he forthwith brings them out and sets them before you. You see one which is neither dark nor clear nor completely drawn, and better fit to decorate on a holiday the walls of the Petit Pont or the Rue Neuve than to be treasured in a famous collection. He admits that it is engraved badly and drawn worse, but hastens to inform you that it is the work of an Italian artist who produced very little, and that the plate had hardly any printing; that, moreover, it is the only one of its kind in France; that he paid much for it, and would not exchange it for something far better. ‘I am,’ he adds, ‘in such a serious trouble that it will prevent any further collecting. I have all of Callot but one print, which is not only not one of his best plates, but actually one of his worst; nevertheless, it would complete my Callot. I have been looking for it for twenty years, and, despairing of success, I find life very hard, indeed.’”
This is admirably descriptive of a born collector; and what would have been a ridiculous mania in a philistine became a natural attitude on the part of such a connaisseur as the Abbé de Marolles. In our eyes his weaknesses were insignificant, and we forgive him his bad translations, his unpublished history of Art, and the rather monotonous self-sufficiency of his Memoirs, for the encouragement which his honest enthusiasm and indomitable collecting gave to the artists who made the Golden Age of Engraving—for having been the Prince of Print-collectors.