The enduring influence of Sir Thomas Browne; 'A Cabinet of Rarities' Erik Desmazières (Thames & Hudson 2012 £35)

When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes; and, having no old experience of the duration of their relicks, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

Sir Thomas Browne - Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658) 

When Thomas Browne was born James I was on the throne and Shakespeare was still alive. He is a difficult writer; his arcane subject matter, Latinate vocabulary and long serpentine sentences can sometimes make his prose impenetrable. In the Oxford English dictionary, he has 775 entries crediting with him with the first use of a word in English; alchemical, ambidextrous, coexistence, computer, continuum, disruption, hallucination, holocaust, therapeutic, and transgressive are amongst the many words he is said to have coined.  He is cited in the OED over 6500 times, which include 4131 entries in which his writing is the earliest evidence of a word used in the language. He perhaps never intended to be a published author; his first book initially came out in an unauthorised edition based on a manuscript that was circulating amongst his friends. Although he survived to a what was a ripe old age for someone born at the beginning of the 17th century, he had been preoccupied with mortality, the impermanence of life and the prospect of death, since his youth. That first published book was a pirated version of the Religio Medici, written when he was in his early thirties; “If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment,” he wrote, rather desolately, for a man in the prime of his life.

Despite spending most of his long, relatively uneventful life in Norwich, Browne was a Londoner, born in the parish of St Michael-le-Querne in Cheapside in 1605. His father was a well to do mercer who died when he was 8. His mother remarried within six months of her husband’s death, to Sir Thomas Dutton. He was educated at William of Wykeham’s foundation in Winchester and Broadgates Hall at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1627 and going to the continent to study medicine at the Universities of Padua, Montpellier and Leiden, where he was awarded a medical degree in 1633. After a short stint in West Yorkshire Browne settled in Norwich to practice medicine, in 1637.  He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641 and the couple had 10 children. When the Civil war broke out Browne was a staunch Royalist living in a town largely loyal to Parliament. He did the sensible thing, kept his views to himself and lived his life as quietly as possible during the tumult of the war and Commonwealth. He was knighted by Charles II on a Royal visit to Norwich in 1671. John Evelyn, one of Browne’s correspondents, was in the royal entourage and took the opportunity to visit; he wrote admiringly in his diary that Browne’s "whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants, natural things". He published just four books in his lifetime, the Religio Medici (authorised version) in 1642, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Beliefs in 1646, an early attempt to combat superstition and widely accepted but false ‘facts’, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, and Mystically Considered, both published in 1658. 

To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations….

Sir Thomas Browne - Hydriotaphia

According to William Stukeley Sir Thomas "dyed” on his 77th birthday, the 19th November 1682,“after eating too plentifully of a Venison Feast." He and was buried in the chancel of the church of St. Peter Mancroft in the centre of Norwich, just a few yards from his house. There he remained, quietly decomposing, for 150 years until 1840 when the sexton, George Potter, was preparing the ground for a new grave for the vicar’s recently deceased wife. The gravediggers were excavating a trench in front of the altar when a pickaxe hit a piece of buried metal. This turned out to be the brass plate on a lead which had split neatly in two from the force of the blow. The inscription on the plate named the occupant of the lead coffin as Dr Thomas Browne hoc luculo indormiens, corporis Spagyrici pulvere plumbum in aurum convertit (sleeping in this grave, by the dust of his alchemic body he changes the lead to gold).  In a letter to the Athenaeum dated September 5thh 1840 Thomas D. Eaton, one of the churchwardens gave an account of what happened next:  

On a closer inspection, the coffin, quaintly described above as having been " transmuted into gold" by the potent dust" of the mighty "alchymist," was found to have been literally converted into a carbonate of lead, which crumbled at the touch, disclosing the bones of its illustrious tenant. There is no truth whatever in the report pretty widely circulated, that the "features remained entire." The flesh had returned “to earth as it was," but the hair of the beard was in good preservation. A portion of this was compared with its representation in an oil painting of the knight, suspended in the vestry, and the colour of the original corresponded exactly with that of the copy. Now we have the testimony of Sir Thomas Browne himself, that ''teeth, bones, and hair give the most lasting defiance to corruption." The skull was sound, and still contained a mass of brain. Unhappily for the phrenologists, the forehead was narrow, low, and receding; whereas that part appropriated to the animal propensities was unusually large. It may he right, perhaps, to add, that the venerable bones thus fortuitously exposed were seen by few, and were reverently handled. After having slept undisturbed for more than century and a half, it was reasonable to presume that they had become incorporated with the soil; no sort of blame therefore could reasonably attach to the selection of their resting place for another occupant. I have thus given the true particulars of a circumstance which I should not have made public, had not erroneous reports gone abroad respecting it. 

One of the ‘few’ who were summoned to see Browne’s bones was local antiquary Robert Fitch, a man later described as one “whose ‘acquisitive complex’ was abnormally developed even for an antiquary.” Shortly after Fitch had visited the coffin plate was noted as missing. Fitch strenuously denied having removed and claimed that the plate was in the possession of the sexton George Potter. Potter denied having taken the plate or having it in his possession. Accusation and counter accusation were made but the plate was not found; not until 1893 that is, 53 years later, when Robert Fitch died and his heirs found the coffin plate in his desk drawer. His shamed faced executors returned the plate to the church. So much attention had been focused on the hue and cry raised over the coffin plate that seemingly no one had noticed that an even bigger trophy had been removed from the grave – Browne’s toothless skull. This reappeared much sooner than the missing coffin plate; by 1845 it was in the possession of a certain Dr. Lubbock who donated it, along with a lock of hair also said to belong to Browne, to the Norwich Hospital where it stayed on public display until the 1920’s. George Potter, the sexton, was (and still is) generally claimed to have been responsible for removing the skull from the grave and then hawking it around Norwich trying to sell it to the highest bidder. Canon Frederick James Meyrick, who was responsible for the campaign that led to the return of the skull to the church in 1922, did not believe George Potter’s to be the guilty party. The Canon, who had a rather snappy writing style for a man of the cloth, wrote an account of the affair entitled ‘Thomas Browne; the story of his skull, his wig and his coffin plate’ which was published in the British Medical Journal on 06 May 1922. “Now the sexton in 1840, when the grave was ‘knav’d,’ was a most worthy and loyal servant of the church,” he wrote, “The sexton of 1840 was a man of considerable means, for he could afford to present the church that he served with such fidelity with a beautiful oak door.” Canon Meyrick’s money was on Robert Fitch; “Did the antiquary, who was the only man who claimed to have seen the skull and who most certainly ‘borrowed’ the coffin plate, also ‘borrow,’ with or without the churchwarden’s consent, the skull?” he asks rhetorically before answering his own question, “it looks like it.” 

Canon Meyrick campaigned long and hard for the return of the skull to the church and on 16 January 1922 the Westminster Gazette reported:

SIR T. BROWNE'S SKULL TO BE REINTERRED BY THE CHURCH.  The controversy between the authorities of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and of St. Peter Mancroft Church regarding the disposal of the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, the famous seventeenth-century Physician and philosopher, ended on Saturday by the decision of the governors of the hospital to hand the skull back to the church, from which it had been taken seventy years ago. The board of management of the hospital recommended that the skull he handed back on condition that it be interred reverently, and not exposed to public view. Canon Merrick, vicar of St. Peter's, suggested that this first condition was like asking a hospital doctor to perform an operation, and adding, "Don't be drunk when you do it." The skull would be interred reverently as a matter of course. Ultimately the governors agreed by a small minority to return the skull to the church unconditionally. Canon Meyrick said that whether it was the skull of the great philosopher or of a poor peasant, it had been entrusted to the church till the end of Time.

Before reburying it in the church, Canon Meyrick sent the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons to be weighed and measured and have a cranial cast taken. On 4 July 1922 it was reinterred in the chancel, Meyrick duly recording the fact in the burial register noting in the address column ‘Norfolk & Norwich Hospital Museum’ and recording Browne’s age as 317. 

Browne’s baroque prose style has garnered many literary admirers over the years including Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Herman Meville, Edgar Allen Poe, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Borges and, most recently, WG Sebald. The admiration is often leavened with an undercurrent of condescension; some of Browne’s “most pleasing performances,” said Dr. Johnson, “have been produced by learning and genius exercised upon subjects of little importance.” Coleridge considered him a man with “a little twist in the brains” while Melville described him as “a crack’d angel.” Chesterton wrote that he was “a man who reverences small [things], who reduces himself to a point, without parts or magnitude, so that to him the grass is really a forest and the grasshopper a dragon.” Jorge Luis Borges, without even a hint of irony, considered him as the best writer of prose in English and said in an interview “When I was a young man, I played the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. I tried to do so in Spanish.” Browne is a writer’s writer and it is unusual to find him influencing an artist. But the French lithographer and printmaker Erik Desmazières seems to have often had his imagination fired as much by writers as by other visual artists. His 2012 book Le Miroir des Vanités (published in English as A Cabinet of Rarities by Thames & Hudson) is, as the English subtitle puts it, an examination of the “antiquarian obsession and the spell of death”, taking as its starting point Sir Thomas’s posthumously published Musaeum Clausum (also known as the Bibliotheca Abscondita).  

Erik Desmazières was born in the Moroccan city of Rabat in in 1948. His father was a French diplomat and he spent his childhood moving between Morocco, Portugal and France. Following family tradition, he studied political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and after graduating began working for the French civil service.  His heart was not really in his career and at night classes he studied drawing and printmaking. In 1975 he gave up his job and devoted himself full time to his art. Under the influence of Albrecht Dürer, Giambattista Piranesi, Jacques Callot and Maurits Escher his prints are finely executed, highly detailed, often hyper realistic but with fantastical elements. His has illustrated limited editions of Borges ‘The Library of Babel’, Kleits ‘The earthquake in Chile’, Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and, in 2009 Browne’s ‘Musaeum Clausum’ (the closed museum).  Desmazières only produced a handful of images for the published book but the subject matter clearly fired his imagination and he went on to produce the dozens that appear in A Cabinet of Rarities.  

In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf wrote that Browne’s mind was ‘one of the finest lumber rooms in the world — a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns' horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery’. This propensity to jumble together the most disparate objects is seen strongly in the ‘Musaeum Clausum’ and which Desmazières draws on so productively in his book. The ‘Musaeum Clausum’ is a tract that reflects Browne's fascination with collecting and cataloguing curiosities, antiquities, and natural objects. A Borgesian note is struck by the fact that all the objects described in the work are invented including a picture of “an Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back”, “a large Ostridges Egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous Battel of Alcazar, in which three Kings lost their lives”, and “the Skin of a Snake bred out of the Spinal Marrow of a Man.” Desmazières wonderful images draw on Browne iconography, his version of the famous photo of Browne’s skull posed on top of a copy of Religio Medici and the painting of Browne and Lady Dorothy in the National Portrait Gallery. There are countless visual mediations on death and decay and three extraordinary fold-out panoramas of a Scarabattolo (influenced by a painting by Domenico Remps?) a representation of Rembrandt’s famous Kunstkammer and a phantasmagoric Wunderkammer with all manner of fish, snakes, walrus and crocodiles suspended from the ceiling of a cavernous room lined with glass cabinets crammed full of urns, vases, coral, stuffed monkeys and birds, mummies, figurines, clocks, shells and other marvellous objects.