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