MARKS OF OPULENCE: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914 - Couverture souple

Platt

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0006531563 ISBN 13 : 9780006531562

Editeur : Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

A sweeping, beautifully written history of artistic patronage from 1000 to the present day by a Wolfson Prize-winning historian.

‘Marks of Opulence’ is a magisterial survey of European art and artistic patronage from 1000 until the birth of modernism. Tracing the history from the discovery of silver in the Harz mountains, through the catastrophic effects of plague in the 14th-century, to the studied magnificence of papal and royal courts in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, Platt shows how the great and the good have always used art to bolster political power.

Arguing that the acquisitive instinct – felt by all of us in different ways – is central to the history of Western art, Platt traces how art began to move out of the palaces of the aristocracy into the homes of merchants, bankers and industrialists. From the mid 19th-century onwards, and in the pre-war Belle Époque in particular, it was the immensely wealthy 'robber barons' and their widows – in London and Paris, in Berlin and Vienna, in Moscow and Barcelona, in Philadelphia and New York – who collected the work of the most innovative artists and broke the hold of the Academies on Western art.

Professor Platt's ambitious sweep through a thousand years of artistic endeavour in the West argues throughout that a superfluity of money is the chief driver of high achievement in the arts, and for the transforming power of great riches.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Colin Platt is Professor of Art History at Southampton University. He is the author of many books including King Death : A History of the Plague, The Architecture of Medieval Britain, which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History, and the classic The Medieval Town. He lives in Devon.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harper Perennial
• Date d'édition: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0006531563
• ISBN 13: 9780006531562
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 402
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible