"Marks of Opulence is a magisterial survey of European art and artistic patronage from 1000 until the triumph of modernism. Tracing art history from the discovery of silver in the Harz mountains, through the catastrophic effects of plague in the fourteenth century, to the studied magnificence of papal and royal courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Colin Platt shows how the great and the good have always used art to bolster political power and self-esteem."--BOOK JACKET.