In the late 19th century, artists were going goth. Works like Vincent van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette (1886), Edvard Munch’s By the Deathbed (1893) and Hugo Simberg’s The Garden ...

An extraordinary wave of artistic and cultural innovation shattered medieval society and brought European culture reluctantly into the modern era ... Italy and an era of total war was soon ...