Queen Christina’s Pictures
Ross Watson describes how, as sovereign of Sweden until 1654 and later as an exile in Rome, Queen Christina was a lavish and discriminating patron of the arts.
Since the time of the Renaissance, when pictures first began to be appreciated as works of art, to be collected and thus to change hands from one owner to another, their fortunes have been bound up with the economic, social and political rise and fall of their owners—a war, or a revolution, the suppression of a religious foundation or the bankruptcy or extinction of a family, leading to the disposal of their possessions.
The frequent wars of the seventeenth century, the more catastrophic economic fluctuations that could reduce the richest families to comparative poverty, and the increasing awareness of Italian art in Northern Europe led to a considerable movement of pictures from one collection to another and especially from Italy, that great storehouse of treasures, to countries across the Alps.
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