[ePub] Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age by Dror Wahrman in Arts-Photography

Description

A sweeping; beautifully written history of artistic patronage from 1000 to the present day by a Wolfson Prize-winning historian.lsquo;Marks of Opulencersquo; 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 ndash; felt by all of us in different ways ndash; 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 Eacute;poque in particular; it was the immensely wealthy robber barons and their widows ndash; in London and Paris; in Berlin and Vienna; in Moscow and Barcelona; in Philadelphia and New York ndash; who collected the work of the most innovative artists and broke the hold of the Academies on Western art.Professor Platts 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.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.