Princely Treasures Film Festival (Perth, Australia)

The Friends of the Art Gallery of Western Australia are proud to introduce this year’s Princely Treasures Film Festival – a series of six documentaries designed to whet your appetite and heighten your appreciation of the works in the forthcoming Princely Treasures exhibition.

Treason, betrayals, scandals, despotism, beheadings, and the rise and fall of monarchs were dark moments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was also the time of the Enlightenment – a period marked by great art, literature, architecture and materialistic opulence.

The Princely Treasures Film Festival is bound to arouse your senses – to help you to feel and see what it was like to be in the midst of it all: Western Civilization was on the rise. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great of Russia adopted new European ideas. Rubens tried his best for peace amongst European states whilst producing great works of art, to counter the Reformation.

Charles II, the “Merry Monarch”, restored his reputation by rebuilding what Cromwell had destroyed. And, of course, let us not forget ‘off with her head’ Marie Antoinette.