Art & architecture
Bridges, cathedrals, baroque palaces, paintings, sculpture, urbanism.
Part of Prague's story
16 moments in this segment.
- — St Vitus Cornerstone. St Vitus Cathedral, begun under Matthias of Arras in 1344 and completed only in 1929. Place: Prague Castle, on the site of the Romanesque basilica of Spytihněv II Figures: Charles, margrave of Moravia · John of Luxembourg, king · Arnošt of Pardubice, archbishop · Matthias of Arras, first master builder Charles brings Matthias of Arras back with him from the papal court in 1342. Matthias is French, has worked at the new cathedrals of Narbonne and Rodez, and brings with him the vocabulary of the High Gothic of southern France: three-story elevation, polygonal apse, ambulatory with radiating chapels. He designs the choir of the new St Vitus on the model of Narbonne, with eight chapels around the apse. On November 21, 1344, the cornerstone is laid. Archbishop Arnošt presides. The blind king and his son both attend. Beneš of Weitmile records the day in a single dry sentence: positus est primus lapis, the first stone has been placed. Matthias builds for eight years and dies in 1352 without having reached the level of the triforium. The choir is roofed in temporary timber.
- — Charles Bridge: the Cornerstone. Charles Bridge from the Lesser Town tower, the stone bridge laid at 5:31 AM on 9 July 1357 by Charles IV. Place: Old Town bridge tower, east bank of the Vltava Figures: Charles IV · Petr Parléř, master builder (succeeds Otto in 1357) Charles IV is a believer, deeply, in the harmonic powers of numbers. The cornerstone of his new stone bridge across the Vltava (the old Judith Bridge collapsed in the floods of 1342) is laid at a moment chosen by his astronomers: year 1357, ninth month, ninth day, at five hours, thirty-one minutes, a palindrome rising and falling in odd integers. The chronicle does not record the weather, but does record the king present, the archbishop present, and the cornerstone blessed. Peter Parler was brought to Prague from Schwäbisch Gmünd, not Cologne. He was born and apprenticed in Schwäbisch Gmünd; his father worked in Cologne earlier in his career, but Peter himself came to Prague from Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1356. The companion folio st-vitus-cornerstone correctly states Schwäbisch Gmünd; this folio contradicts it. He will build it in red sandstone for forty-five years. It will be the only bridge across the river for the next four and a half centuries.
- — The Astronomical Clock. The Prague Orloj on the south wall of the Old Town Hall, first installed in 1410 by Mikuláš of Kadaň. Place: South wall, Old Town Hall, Staroměstské náměstí Figures: Mikuláš of Kadaň, clockmaker · Jan Šindel, court astronomer of King Wenceslas IV The lower dial is added later (1490s, by Master Hanuš, often confused in legend with the original builder). The upper dial, the astronomical one, dates from 1410. It is the work of Mikuláš of Kadaň, a clockmaker, in collaboration with Jan Šindel, professor of mathematics and astronomy at the still-young Charles University. It shows four times at once: Old Czech time (sunset reset to zero); German hours (the 24-hour clock); Babylonian hours (variable, from sunrise); and sidereal time. The sun and moon ride a zodiac belt. It is the oldest astronomical clock still operating in the world.
- — Wallenstein Assassinated. Anonymous 17th century copper engraving of the murder of Albrecht von Wallenstein at Eger (Cheb), 25 February 1634. The Irish dragoon Walter Devereux pins him with a partisan in his nightshirt. Place: Cheb (Eger), western Bohemia; his palace stands in Malá Strana, Prague Figures: Albrecht Václav Eusebius z Valdštejna (Wallenstein) · Walter Devereux, Irish dragoon captain · Ferdinand II, who signed the order in Vienna Wallenstein, born Protestant in northern Bohemia, converts in 1606, marries a wealthy widow, marries another, and emerges from the White Mountain confiscations as the largest single beneficiary in the kingdom. He buys sixty-four estates at fire-sale prices, mints his own coin (debased; he is fined), and assembles a private duchy in Friedland. From 1623 he assembles, in Malá Strana, the first secular palace of monumental scale in Prague: twenty-three houses demolished, a Sala Terrena and pleasure garden carved in, five courtyards, a riding school. It is finished in 1630. He moves in for a single year. The Emperor needs him in the field: Ferdinand II has lost Magdeburg, lost Tilly, lost the north. Wallenstein takes the army back, fights Gustavus Adolphus to a Swedish tactical victory at Lützen in November 1632 (Gustavus dies on the field; Wallenstein withdraws in good order to Bohemia), but spends 1633 negotiating with Saxony, France, and Sweden simultaneously. The Emperor concludes he is treating.
- — St John Nepomuk on the Bridge. The bronze statue of St John of Nepomuk on Charles Bridge, cast in Nuremberg by Wolfgang Hieronymus Heroldt from Jan Brokoff's wooden model (Matthias Rauchmiller's clay design), set in place 1683. The first sculpture on the bridge. Place: Charles Bridge, the eighth pier from the Old Town end Figures: Matthias Rauchmiller, designer · Jan Brokoff, who carved the wooden model from which the bronze was cast · Matthias of Wunschwitz, donor In 1683, the three-hundredth anniversary of John Nepomuk's traditional martyrdom (1383, the more reliable date is 1393), a bronze statue is set on the eighth pier of the Charles Bridge. It is designed by the Tyrolean Matthias Rauchmiller, modeled in clay in Vienna, and cast in Norimberk by Wolf Hieronymus Heroldt. It depicts Nepomuk with five stars circling his head (for the five Latin letters of tacui, I was silent) and a crucifix in his arms. It is the first statue on the bridge. The bridge has been bare stone for three hundred and twenty-six years. Within forty-one years there will be thirty more, all Baroque, all donated by religious orders, noble families, or guilds in expiation for something. The bridge becomes, in effect, an open-air sermon, walked daily by everyone crossing the Vltava.
- — The Estates Theatre Opens. The Estates Theatre (Stavovské divadlo) on Železná street, Old Town. Built 1781–83 by Anton Haffenecker for Count Nostitz, opened 21 April 1783 with Lessing's Emilia Galotti, and still operating on its original stage. One of the few European theatres of its century never to have burned down. Place: Stavovské divadlo (then Gräflich Nostitzsches Nationaltheater), Železná street, Old Town Figures: Count Franz Anton von Nostitz-Rieneck, patron · Anton Haffenecker, architect · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (the opening play, posthumous) · Pasquale Bondini, impresario from 1784 Count Nostitz, a Bohemian aristocrat with the means and the taste, pays for the theatre out of his own pocket: fifty-eight thousand gulden, raised entirely from his estates. Haffenecker designs a Neoclassical box of severe restraint, in keeping with Joseph's reign: pale yellow facade, plain pilasters, no exterior statuary. Inside, four tiers of boxes line a horseshoe; the acoustics are calculated against the Italian opera houses that Nostitz has visited. It opens on 21 April 1783 with Lessing's Emilia Galotti, performed by a German troupe. The choice is deliberate: Lessing has been dead two years, and the play is the keystone of the German bourgeois tragedy, the genre Nostitz wishes to plant in his city. Joseph II approves by letter from Vienna and does not attend.
- — Mozart premieres Don Giovanni. Unfinished portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, 1782 or 1789. The composer's widow Constanze thought it the best likeness ever made. He was thirty-one at the Estates Theatre podium on 29 October 1787, conducting the world premiere of Don Giovanni. Place: Estates Theatre (Stavovské divadlo), Old Town Figures: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, conducting · Lorenzo Da Ponte, librettist · Pasquale Bondini, impresario · Teresa Saporiti, the first Donna Anna Mozart writes in a letter from Prague in January 1787, after Le nozze di Figaro has played there to delirium while Vienna grows bored: here they talk of nothing but Figaro, here they play nothing but Figaro, sing nothing but Figaro. The impresario Bondini commissions a new opera on the spot. The fee is one hundred ducats and the city's enthusiasm. He returns in October with Da Ponte's libretto and most of an opera. Most. Not all. The overture is famously written the night before the premiere, or the morning of, depending on the witness. Constanze keeps him awake with coffee and ghost stories. Copyists transcribe the parts wet.
- — The Prague Conservatoire. The Rudolfinum, on the right bank of the Vltava. The Prague Conservatoire, founded in April 1811 at the Convent of the Knights of the Cross, moved here in 1885 and remained until 1946. The Dvořák Hall has stood at the heart of Czech musical training for more than a century. Place: Originally at the Convent of the Knights of the Cross; later at the Rudolfinum after 1885 Figures: Count Johann Joseph von Pachta and the Bohemian musical nobility (founders of the Verein) · Bedřich Diviš Weber, first director · Carl Maria von Weber, director of the Estates Theatre opera 1813–1816 (related to but distinct from Bedřich Diviš) Six Bohemian noblemen, all amateur musicians, found the Verein zur Beförderung der Tonkunst in Böhmen in spring 1810 with the explicit goal of opening a conservatoire. The state will not fund it. The Habsburg treasury is empty from the Napoleonic wars (the Austrian state has formally defaulted on 20 February 1811, two months before the conservatoire opens). The aristocracy pays. The Lobkowicz, Kinský, Sternberg, Pachta, Clam-Gallas, and Nostitz families subscribe. On 24 April 1811 the Prague Conservatoire opens with twenty-one pupils studying string instruments. It is six years ahead of the Vienna Conservatoire (1817), eighteen ahead of London's Royal Academy (1822), and seventy-four ahead of any Czech-language school in the city. The first director, Bedřich Diviš Weber (Friedrich Dionys Weber, in the German press) sets the curriculum on Italian conservatoire models: chamber playing first, theory second, solo performance third.
- — The Provisional Theatre opens. The Provisional Theatre, period view by Bohumil Roubalík Place: Vltava embankment, Prague New Town Figures: Ignác Vojtěch Ullmann, architect · the committee for a National Theatre (still campaigning) The Czech-language theatre committee has been raising money for a permanent National Theatre since the 1840s. Every famine, every reaction, every bureaucratic delay pushes the building further into the future. By 1862 the campaign is twenty years old and the country needs a stage now, not eventually. The Provisional Theatre, Prozatímní divadlo, is built on the Vltava embankment in six months on a strip of land donated by the city. It seats eight hundred. The architect, Ignác Ullmann, designs a neo-Renaissance box with the proportions of a large concert hall. It opens on November 18, 1862, with a prologue by Vítězslav Hálek and Cherubini's overture to The Water Carrier. The German Estates Theatre, where Mozart had his Don Giovanni seventy-five years earlier, continues unaffected on its corner of the Old Town. Two stages, two languages, one city.
- — National Theatre cornerstone. The National Theatre seen from the west, period view before the 1881 fire Place: Embankment of the Vltava, beside the Provisional Theatre Figures: František Palacký, historian, laying the first stone · Josef Zítek, architect · 150,000 spectators The cornerstone is quarried from the hill of Říp in central Bohemia. In Cosmas's chronicle, this is where the forefather Čech climbs and surveys the land and tells his people they have arrived. The stone is transported the forty miles to Prague by carriage, escorted by villagers at every stop. On May 16, 1868, it is laid with hammers struck in turn by Palacký, Smetana, Karel Sladkovský, and a sequence of regional patriots, each adding a blow. A hundred and fifty thousand people watch. The population of Prague at the time is around 160,000. Pamphlets and pull-quotes are read out. The architect, Josef Zítek, has won the design competition with a neo-Renaissance scheme drawn from Italian models, golden roof above sandstone walls, Apollo and the Muses on the loggia.
- — National Theatre burns. The National Theatre burning, August 1881, contemporary depiction Place: Národní třída embankment Figures: Josef Schulz, architect (rebuild) · the city's fire brigades · the public subscription, opening again the next morning The National Theatre opens on June 11, 1881, with Smetana's Libuše, composed nine years earlier for exactly this occasion. Eleven performances follow that summer. Workmen return after the gala to finish the lightning conductor on the roof, which the rush to opening had left half-installed. They work with open braziers in the August heat. The auditorium is locked beneath them. At 4 p.m. on August 12, smoke is seen rising from above the cupola. The brigades arrive within fifteen minutes, but the Vltava taps have low pressure and the auditorium ceiling has just been finished in seasoned spruce. The fire reaches the gas mains by six. By eleven that night the roof has fallen in. By dawn the building is a sandstone shell open to the sky.
- — Čapek's R.U.R. and the Word Robot. Photograph from the original 1921 staging of Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti at the National Theatre, the play that introduced the word robot to the world. Place: National Theatre (Národní divadlo), Národní třída Figures: Karel Čapek, playwright · Josef Čapek, painter and brother (coiner) · Vojta Novák, director · Bedřich Karen, the first Domin Karel Čapek, 31, has drafted a play about an island factory that manufactures artificial humans, sells them as labor across the world, watches them rebel, and witnesses the extinction of the species that built them. He has a problem with the noun. He tries laboři, from Latin, and finds it wooden. He asks his brother Josef, painter and Cubist, at work in the next room. Josef, brush in hand, mutters roboti, from robota: the old Slavic word for the forced corvée labor a serf owed his lord. Karel writes it down. It is among the most successful neologisms of the twentieth century. The play, Rossumovi univerzální roboti, is published in November 1920. Hradec Králové stages a provincial premiere on January 2, 1921. The National Theatre in Prague follows on January 25, directed by Vojta Novák with sets by Bedřich Feuerstein.
- — The Rudolfinum opens. The Rudolfinum, neo-Renaissance facade on Jan Palach Square Place: Vltava embankment, opposite the National Theatre Figures: Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, presiding · Josef Zítek and Josef Schulz, architects · the Böhmische Sparkasse, donor The Bohemian Savings Bank (Böhmische Sparkasse) is fifty years old in 1880. To mark the jubilee it commissions a building it will donate to the city: a concert hall, an art gallery, and exhibition rooms, on the Vltava embankment opposite the National Theatre then nearing completion. The architects are Zítek and Schulz, the same pair. The name is Dům umělců, the House of Artists, but the building is dedicated to the Habsburg crown prince Rudolf and so becomes, in popular use, the Rudolfinum. The chrome is neo-Renaissance, like the theatre, but lighter in spirit. The Dvořák Hall seats 1,200 with celebrated acoustics. The art gallery, in the south wing, becomes one of the first public galleries in Central Europe. The subject dates from 1885; this photograph was taken in 2005.
- — Loos's Müller Villa. The Müller Villa in Střešovice, completed 1930. Adolf Loos's Raumplan made flesh: a plain white box outside, a precisely choreographed cascade of rooms inside. Place: Nad hradním vodojemem 14, Střešovice Figures: Adolf Loos, architect (Brno-born, Vienna-trained) · Karel Lhota, co-architect · František Müller, engineer · Milada Müllerová Adolf Loos, 59, his health failing after cancer surgery a decade earlier and nearly deaf; he has spent forty years arguing that ornament is crime and that the inside of a building is not the outside. František Müller, partner in the Prague construction firm Kapsa & Müller (which will build the villa with its own labor), commissions a house in Střešovice in 1928. Loos works from Vienna by correspondence; his Czech collaborator Karel Lhota handles the site. Permission is denied by the city building office three times for being too austere. Construction begins in October 1929 and finishes in summer 1930. From the street the villa is a white cube with a few asymmetrical windows. The street facade gives nothing. Das Haus sei nach außen verschwiegen, im Inneren offenbare es seinen ganzen Reichtum, Loos has written: the house should be silent outside and reveal its full wealth within. The subject dates from 1930; this photograph was taken in 2009.
- — National Theatre reopens. The rebuilt National Theatre on the Vltava embankment Place: National Theatre, Vltava embankment Figures: Bedřich Smetana, in the orchestra stalls, deaf · Marie Sittová as Libuše · the audience that funded both buildings Smetana composed Libuše in 1869–72 with a single instruction in the score: it is to be performed only on great national occasions. The first such occasion was the National Theatre's first opening in June 1881. The second is the reopening, after the fire and the rebuild, on November 18, 1883. The composer is in the stalls. He is fifty-nine. He has been deaf for nine years and is beginning to lose his mind to tertiary syphilis. He cannot hear his own opera. He watches the conductor's beat and the singers' mouths. His portrait, hung above the proscenium for the occasion, looks down at the man it was painted from. The opera begins, in the prophetic mode, with the princess Libuše foreseeing Prague. The subject dates from 1883; this photograph was taken in 2016.
- — The Empty Bridge. Charles Bridge in March 2020. The stone span Charles IV laid in 1357 stands empty for the first time in any living memory. Place: Charles Bridge · Old Town Square · Prague Castle (closed) Figures: Andrej Babiš, prime minister · Adam Vojtěch, health minister · the absent tourists On March 12, 2020, the Czech government declares a state of emergency. On March 14, retail closes except for essentials. On March 16, the borders close to foreign nationals, and the order to wear masks in public places takes effect, the first such order in any EU country. On March 19, masks become mandatory outdoors as well. The tourism economy that has rebuilt the Old Town since the early 1990s is suspended in forty-eight hours. Photographs taken from the Old Town bridge tower on the morning of March 16 show Charles Bridge empty for the first time in living memory. There are no statues being photographed, no portrait painters, no buskers, no Vietnamese cellists, no school groups. The bridge has not looked like this since the Swedish siege of 1648, and even then there were soldiers.
