The act of having Parr carted to London is consonant with the Earl's reputation as a zealous collector of antiquities. While his travels on the Continent usually netted him sumptuous portraits by Italian masters – he owned in all more than eight hundred paintings by 1642 – or statuary relics from his archaeological digs of ancient Rome. In Parr he reels in an aged human being, a relic of the pastoral life.
The fascination with collecting antiquarian specimens and the aristocratic quest for rarities, in the early seventeenth century did not bespeak a genuine interest in science. It was only a superficial and amateurish commitment to the Baconian ideal of experimental science, or rather the very antithesis of it. Instead, 'it encouraged the mentality of the fair-ground peep-show'. Arundel is a greedy urban colonist, Parr a spectacle of biblical age, an aristocrat's Elephant Man.
