Crowning Glories

Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV’s propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century – three historical touchstones – to examine what it would have meant for France’s elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy’s elaborate palace decors, the court’s official records, and the class