Throne of the Great Mogul in Dresden

Dror Wahrman holds the Vigevani Chair in European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is president of the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo. He is the author of The Making of the Modern Self and Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age and coauthor of Invisible Hands: Self Organization and the Eighteenth Century. He lives in Jaffa, Israel.

“This book is truly compelling. In its rethinking of a singular object, Wahrman manages to write a startlingly new history of court culture, consumption, representation, the material, the Baroque . . . and Dresden. I loved it.”—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes“Wahrman takes us on brilliant and enthralling tour of late seventeenth-century European culture. This deftly crafted book takes the artisanal productions of that age as its best portraits, and always to the reader’s delight.”—Timothy Brook, author of Vermeer’s Hat“Wahrman deciphers a truly unique, incredibly puzzling work of art and uses it as a key to the universe of baroque culture. A masterpiece of refined scholarship, elegantly written, full of subtle interpretations and surprising insights.”—Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Institute for Advanced Study“Departing from a painstaking and elegant study of a single Saxon masterpiece, Dror Wahrman’s book offers us a breakthrough model for writing the history of eighteenth-century material culture in a transnational perspective.”—Suzanne Marchand, author of Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe