The Age of Greatness and the Baroque

War booty, palaces and splendour: a Sweden that wanted to look like a great power.

During the Thirty Years' War art was brought to Sweden as war booty – among it Arcimboldo's pictures from Prague and the Codex Gigas. Queen Christina gathered art and scholars at her court.

David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl came from Hamburg and became “the father of Swedish painting”. He painted royalty, allegories and the king's horses and dogs for the palaces.

The architects Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and the Younger built Drottningholm and the Royal Palace in Stockholm after Italian and French models. The warship Vasa of 1628, with its hundreds of sculptures, shows the visual language of the Baroque in wood.

• War booty and Queen Christina's collections
• David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl – the life of a court painter
• Tessin father and son
• Palaces of the nobility and Skokloster
• The Vasa's sculptures
• Erik Dahlbergh and Suecia antiqua et hodierna
• Churches, burial chapels and the splendour of mourning
• Hedvig Eleonora and the women around the arts
• The Age of Greatness in the eyes of posterity
• David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl
• Nicodemus Tessin d.y.
• David von Krafft