Collection of Collectors

Francis Henry Taylor presides over one of the world's biggest & best art collections. Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, which he directs, bulges with a round half-million treasures. But the men who bought and sold them down the centuries, Taylor thinks, are almost as interesting as the works themselves. For twelve years he has been working in his spare time on a history of art-collecting from King Tut to Napoleon--the only work of its kind in English.

Taylor's history, The Taste of Angels (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $10), turned out to be as stately, plump, and full of incidental intelligence as the man himself.

Among the tidbits:

P: Alexander the Great, "moved by a nostalgia for the purity of ancient Athenian civilization, became a collector of antiquities."

P: Proconsul Verres, a grasping fellow who rose to the governorship of Sicily, "possessed probably the finest eye for works of art of anyone in the ancient world."

Verres lost his life after he refused to give Mark Antony some of his Corinthian bronzes. "The story is told that when Mark Antony sent him the poison to drink in a murrhine cup, the most valuable article in his collection, Verres drank the poison quickly and dashed the cup upon the marble floor, smashing it into a thousand pieces."

P: Rembrandt "was himself an omnivorous collector whose eyes and appetites were, unfortunately, larger than his pocketbook . . . Not only was he a collector of paintings and drawings by the old masters . . . but his collection of prints contained a working library of ideas and iconographical suggestions. Moreover his passion for antique busts was rivaled only by his interest in weapons and ethnological specimens from America and the Indies. His paintings further show that he kept a vast costumery; among these were the magnificent vestments . . . which appear in his studies of Jewish rabbis and in the Biblical scenes . . ."

P: Cardinal Mazarin showed "to what extent possessions can take possession of the possessor." Before he died, Mazarin shuffled sadly through his collection, wearing a nightcap and camel's-hair wrapper, and left the room saying, "Goodbye, dear pictures that I have loved so well and which have cost me so very much."

P: Napoleon, artistically the Goering of his day, sacked Italy to fill the Louvre. "We will have everything that is beautiful in Italy," he decided, "except a small number of objects at Turin and at Naples." He even forced Pope Pius VI to sign a treaty whereby the Louvre acquired (if only for a few short years) a hundred of the Vatican's greatest jewels.

"History," Taylor concludes, "has often seen these phenomena of nations turning to the arts in their prosperity . . . We in the United States, too, are now seeing this same development take place. It is a form of intellectual compensation or atonement for dominating the world at a given period--tempered perhaps with an all too human instinct for the display of wealth."

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