My CommonPlace

In his 2007 book Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, Arthur MacGregor quotes 17th century philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon, as saying that a proper collection was “a model of universal nature, made private.” MacGregor, who is a curator at the Ashmolean Museum in England, shows that the “purposeful collecting” of Western European collectors embodied nothing less than revolutionary thought on cosmology and nature.