I jumped on this thread to say exactly this. I visited the Vasa museum in Stockholm a few years back. The Vasa is an amazingly preserved shipwreck from the 160

I jumped on this thread to say exactly this. I visited the Vasa museum in Stockholm a few years back. The Vasa is an amazingly preserved shipwreck from the 1600s. There ship is mostly original and looks like bare brown wood like everyone imagines a shipwreck to look like. However, they have a model and reproductions of parts of the ship showing how they were brilliantly painted. The tour guide made clear that the aesthetic beauty and conspicuous consumption on display was as much a part of the kings arsenal as the cannons. It really changed the way i looked on the past.