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...