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.

Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914

Arts & Photography

PLATT, Colin

History & Criticism

Harper-perennial

Subtitled `a social history', this book Ä with its feast of fine pictures Ä is about largesse (and the distribution of surplus wealth), the growing demand for personal privacy and improvements in domestic comfort. `Life styles are my subject', writes Colin Platt, `and buildings are my documents Ä the most sensitive and reliable of social indicators'.

The Architecture of Medieval Britain

Yale University Press

The Atlas of Medieval Man

Covering the years between AD 1,000 to 1,500, an illustrated volume includes information on the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the spread of Islam. By the author of Medieval England. Reprint. PW.

The atlas of medieval man.

History

New York: St. Martin's Press, [1980]

Covering the years between AD 1,000 to 1,500, an illustrated volume includes information on the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the spread of Islam. By the author of Medieval England. Reprint.

Europe

St Martins Pr

The monastic grange in medieval England: A reassessment

Macmillan

The atlas of mediaeval man

Historical Study & Educational Resources

By drawing equally on the work of historians and archaeologists, Colin Platt puts forward a view of English medieval society in which there is much that is new and unexpected. Medieval England brings together a wide range of themes, from castle and palace to peasant hovel, from the great cathedrals and monasteries to the parish churches and `alien' cells. The book is fully illustrated, the pictures being an integral part of the text.For this re-issue Professor Platt has written a new preface which updates the work with a survay of archaeological and historical developments in the last decade.

Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to A.D. 1600

Politics & Social Sciences

Archaeology

Routledge& Kegan Paul

Understanding Medieval England: A new social history and archaeology 1000-1550

Rushton, Neil

Routledge

By drawing equally on the work of historians and archaeologists, Colin Platt puts forward a view of English medieval society in which there is much that is new and unexpected. Medieval England brings together a wide range of themes, from castle and palace to peasant hovel, from the great cathedrals and monasteries to the parish churches and `alien' cells. The book is fully illustrated, the pictures being an integral part of the text.For this re-issue Professor Platt has written a new preface which updates the work with a survay of archaeological and historical developments in the last decade.

Medieval England

The English medieval town

A review of the emergence of the concept of the town in Medieval England

The English Medieval Town

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

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Books by PLATT, Colin