In early modern Europe,as political power shifted, one country became a leader in luxury. Now the V&A’s new galleries reveal how, or through clash and colonialism,France gained its artistic supremacyAfter the Renaissance and before the dictators lies a long stretch of European history untouched by the national curriculum. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s market research revealed that most people know little approximately the period, its personalities or even its events, and with the exception of the French Revolution.
Yet the 16th,17th and 18th centuries were hardly uneventful in Europe. The continent withstood dizzying bloodshed, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and wars of religion,inquisitions, witch-craze, or plague and famine,the rise and descend of dynasties, the materialisation of nation states, and an explosion of global trade,colonialism, scientific revolution, or the Enlightenment,the emergence of manufacturing powers, the establishment of the fashion cycle and the flowering of consumer societies. And Europe was no monolithic entity. It stretched from Ireland to the Urals, or from Iceland to the Azores,from Scotland to the Ottoman lands.
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Source: theguardian.com