Brigid von Preussen

In​ 1807, Angelica Kauffman’s body was carried in state to her funeral at the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. A small army of priests, artists and dignitaries accompanied the coffin. Above the mourners, amid a sea of candles, two of her paintings were carried aloft in triumphal procession – a theatrical touch that echoed another funeral three centuries earlier,...

If anyone​ could spark a craze for dresses the colour of ingested blood, it was Marie Antoinette. In 1775, so the story goes, Louis XVI saw her in a purplish-brown dress and christened it couleur de puce – the colour of a flea. Soon dresses were being made in shades of ventre de puce (flea’s belly) and cuisse de puce (flea’s thigh), names that evoke the erotic intimacy of a...

In​ 1768, Josiah Wedgwood’s accountant reported an extraordinary event in his regular letter to the firm’s London offices. Among the details of invoices and updates on recent orders, he wrote that ‘Mr Wedgwood has this day had his leg taken off and is as well as can be expected after such an execution.’ Wedgwood was 38 years old and had suffered decades of pain...