The supposed growth of state power was long considered as one of the defining elements of the early modern period. Whether it be Burckhardt's state as a work of art or Weber's bureaucratic impersonal state, historians up to a generation ago saw the rise of a centralized, absolutist state as a central characteristic of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in most of Europe. The works of Federico Chabod are perhaps the best application of these ideas to Italian history. In the last twenty-five years or so, however, historians have begun to doubt the actual extent of state power; while the state apparatus certainly grew in bulk, its effectiveness in replacing or weakening other centers of power has been called into question. Historians have studied phenomena like patronage and clientage networks, and Italian historians in particular have stressed the persisting importance of local elite groups and traditional institutions in Italy's regional states, and the dialectic relationship between center and periphery within them. State power grew, when it did, in fits and bounds, and often in the service of the vested interests of particularistic groups. The concept of absolutism does little justice to a complex process that witnessed the continuing thriving of traditional centers of power and social groups.