The manifestation of a collector’s appetite for discovering and mastering theworld—represented by singular items of natural history, geology, art, orrelics—cabinets of curiosities and rarities became popular in the Renaissanceand were precursors to the modern museum.Largely inspired by seventeenth-century scientist and antiquary Sir ThomasBrowne, whose esoteric writings have long appealed to scholars, this rarenew work is a bibliophile’s delight. Erik Desmazières’s contemporary etchingspresent a cabinet of rarities portraying a collection of the recondite, rare, andbizarre, complete with emblems of the vanity of earthly life and intimationsof mortality. Death and decay are favorite subjects: a skull recalls depictionsof Sir Thomas Browne’s own, disinterred and displayed in a local museumuntil the 1920s. These abstruse objects and specters of death, subject matteronce considered the preserve of specialists, have entered the cultural mainstreamand have found a broad popular audience.