The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 7, Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution
The latter half of the eighteenth century was an era of contradictions: unparalleled luxury and abject poverty; absolute monarchs and republican pamphleteers; unquestioned faith and reasoned skepticism; Rococo fantasy and classical purity—an epoch that witnessed the splendid, waning hours of the old order and the violent birth of the modern age. For the privileged few,