Skokloster Castle — Dahlbergh

A magnificent bird's-eye view of Skokloster Castle, the unfinished Baroque palace of Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Wrangel on Lake Mälaren.

Drawn, engraved and published by Erik Jönsson Dahlbergh. From Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna. Published in Stockholm, c. 1690.

Skokloster, begun in 1654 and never fully completed, preserves a uniquely intact 17th-century interior whose contents remain largely as Wrangel left them at his death in 1676. Dahlbergh's plate immortalises the building at the moment of its symbolic completion, framing it as the apogee of Sweden's brief age of empire and aristocratic plunder.

Copperplate engraving. Good.