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.