Barbara Drake Boehm, Jiri Fajt, eds. Prague, the Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437. Metropolitan Museum of Art Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Illustrations. xiii + 366 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-11138-5.

Reviewed by James Palmitessa (Department of History, Western Michigan University)
Published on H-German (November, 2007)

European Cultural Integration in the Late Middle Ages

In the foreword to Prague the Crown of Bohemia 1347-1437, Philippe de Montebello, director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, notes that "[s]ince the Velvet Revolution, not only chroniclers and poets but throngs of tourists flock to Prague, to see its imposing castle, its soaring cathedral and mighty bridge. Still, many do not realize how much of the city's fairytale skyline and how many of its treasures were created after Charles IV established his new European capital on the banks of the Vltava (Moldau)" (p. vi). The book is a companion volume to a landmark exhibition held in Prague and New York in 2005-6, co-organized with the Prague Castle Administration and curated by Barbara Drake Boehm of the museum and Ji?i Fajt, project director at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas in Leipzig. The exquisite, large-format book includes hundreds of high-quality photographs of paintings, drawings, sculpture, architecture, glasswork, textiles, and illuminated books. Dozens of institutions and individuals in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Vatican, Sweden, the United States, and nine other countries contributed to the exhibition. A series of essays written by an international team of ten scholars makes up the first half of the book; the catalogue entries by an expanded group of forty make up the second half. Together they make this volume a scholarly tour-de-force that fulfills the task Montebello sets.

In the first essay, an excellent introduction to the rest of the volume, Fajt describes Charles's family background and the formative years that influenced his art patronage. Born in 1316, the son of John of Luxembourg and Elizabeth of the Bohemian royal house of P?emyslid, the future King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor was baptized under the name Wenceslas (Václav). At the age of seven he was sent to the French court and changed his name to Charles in honor of his sponsor. Fajt writes that he was reared there in an atmosphere of ceremonial piety, participating in events at Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis. "Perhaps [St. Denis's] famous treasury awakened his interest in the classical and Byzantine past, which may help explain aspects of his [later] donations" (p. 4). In 1330, Charles was sent to northern Italy to protect Luxembourg holdings, where he became acquainted with its sophisticated art and urban culture. After returning home, even before his father turned over Bohemia to him in 1342, Charles expanded and renovated the royal castle, linking it to the adjacent All Saints Chapel, borrowing from the example of Sainte-Chapelle. In 1344, Charles's former tutor, who had since become Pope Clement VI, elevated Prague to an archdiocese, and Charles entrusted the construction of the new St. Vitus Cathedral to French builder Matthias of Arras. After his royal coronation in 1347, Charles IV took steps to solidify Bohemia's position in the Empire; and from then on, according to Fajt, "policy decisions were often linked to his increased activity as a patron, which was concentrated on transforming Prague into a splendid imperial capital" (p. 7). By the time Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, an "Imperial style" began to emerge in the art of the Prague court, which formed the basis of the distinctive Bohemian variation on the International Gothic style, which earlier Czech art historians referred to as "the Beautiful style" (krásný sloh).

An important role in the development of the Imperial style was played, according to Fajt, by Jan of St?eda, the director of Charles's chancellery and a well-known Bohemian supporter of Italian humanism. St?eda provided new direction to book illuminating workshops, seen in the Liber viaticus, which, Fajt argues, displays command of technical and artistic devices in Sienese art and set the standard for Bohemian manuscripts until the fifteenth century. In painting, the development of the Imperials can be seen in the renovation of Karlstejn Castle, a hunting lodge of the Luxembourgs a day's ride from the royal castle (just as Vincennes was from Paris). During the years 1356-57, the walls of the castle hall were painted with portraits of Charles's Luxembourg and Brabantine ancestors by an artist identified as Charles's first painter, whom Fajt states was probably Nicholas Wurmser from Strasbourg. Fajt goes on to comment that "[t]he Master of the Luxembourg genealogy ... brought to the Prague region the kind of Franco-Flemish nature study without which the further development of painting at the imperial court and the birth of the portrait in central Europe are unthinkable" (p. 11). Around 1360, Master Theodoric decorated the Holy Cross Chapel with 130 panel paintings of saints; holy relics were placed in the painting frames and in a special niche of a wall. According to Fajt, the newly decorated chapel, reminiscent of lavishly decorated palaces of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, the papal chapel of Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace in Rome, and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, "equated the idea of the empire with the church triumphant" (p. 13).

Boehm draws on Charles's writings and those of contemporary chroniclers to examine his faith and its impact on art patronage. She writes that Charles expressed an appreciation for being taught to read the hours during his education and followed this ritual throughout his life, although unfortunately no trace of any personal book collection survives. The most demonstrable aspect of his spirituality was his devotion to saints and their relics. During his last visit to Paris in 1378 he acquired the relics of Christ's passion used in the decoration of the Bohemian crown of Wenceslas, which Charles commissioned and was patterned after the crowns of both P?emyslid rulers and French royalty. Other relics were donated to St. Vitus Cathedral. Boehm comments that Prague's reputation as a repository for relics was surpassed only by that of Rome.

In two later essays, Fajt and Robert Suckale explore the influence of Charles IV's political alliances on art. Within Bohemia, where the nobility traditionally enjoyed widespread autonomy, Charles established close ties with the bishops, who helped him gain administrative control of his kingdom. He found a loyal ally in Arnošt of Pardubice, the first Archbishop of Prague. Arnošt commissioned a large number of important artistic projects, including choirbooks, manuscripts, and stained glass windows in monasteries and hospitals. Among the few surviving works is a painting of the Virgin and Child located today in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie. Outside of Bohemia, Charles arranged the marriage of his daughter to Casimir of Cracow. Fajt and Suckale show how the art of Cracow became indebted to Bohemian examples and how a Bohemian orientation in Polish art continued even after the Jagiellonian dynasty came to power. The Luxembourgs also sought allies in Salzburg to isolate the Habsburgs and many examples of Bohemian influence can be found there. On the other hand, however, Luxembourg rivalry with the Bavarian Wittelsbachs did not stop them from borrowing from the art of the Wittelsbach court.

Paul Crossley and Zoë Opa?i? provide a superb discussion on the New City as one of largest urban foundation projects of the Middle Ages. They highlight how the layout of streets, squares, churches, and monasteries in the New City and the new bridge between the Old and New Cities were designed to complement the existing infrastructure, to join these two communities and the settlement around the Castle, both spatially and symbolically, into a new unified city. They place these developments in a much broader historical context than earlier scholarship, noting the shift of power from the nearby Vyšehrad Hill to the Castle Hill in the ninth century and the work done in the city under John of Luxembourg. "But it was Charles," they write, "with his charismatic mixture of pragmatism and ideology his talent for self-publicity, and sacro-egoismo [who] saw the potential in Prague ... as a dynastic base from which to secure the fortune of the Luxembourgs and launch his claim to the imperial throne (pp. 59-60).

Boehm paints a profile, as far as the sources allow, of artistic communities in Prague at the time of Charles IV. She notes that the painters of the Old and New Cities of Prague established a brotherhood within a year of Charles's 1347 royal coronation for which membership records exist; that more than seventy goldsmiths were active in Prague; as well as numerous illuminators, scribes, and glass glazers for whom little information is available. She also suggests that while polishers of semiprecious stones may not have been as numerous in Prague as in Paris or Venice, Prague would have been viewed as an especially attractive place to work, thanks to Charles's commissions for the intricate stone work at Karlstejn and in St. Vitus Cathedral.

In describing the state of Prague Jewry, Vivian Mann notes that Jews lived in four different areas of the city with the largest settlement around the Altneuschul, the oldest extant synagogue in Europe. She also notes that Jewish property was confiscated during the reign of John of Luxembourg, but when Charles IV came to power he reaffirmed an earlier charter of King Otakar (1254) that granted Jews the right to self-government and offered protection to them and their communal properties. Charles also awarded Jews their own community flag as acknowledgement of their service to Prague.

Boehm and Fajt also discuss the artistic legacy of Charles's IV son and successor, Wenceslas (Václav) IV. They note that while his reign was marked by political and religious turmoil, it also witnessed the apogee of the "Beautiful Style" as work continued on the sculptural program of the Tower Bridge--which celebrated the political victories of Charles IV, the end of conflict with the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, the acquisition of Brandenburg, and his election as king--with important relocation and new foundation projects at the university. Gerhard Schmidt argues that the term "Beautiful Style" is accurate in describing the Bohemian late Gothic in that it was especially creative when it came to iconography; creating the prototypes of what are called "beautiful Madonnas" and pietàs, characterized by lavishly draped cloaks and naked, thrashing infants. Free form linear design, seen in the portrayal of human hair or draping of a fabric in an almost calligraphic form, also characterizes the Beautiful Style.

In a discussion of the Hussite Revolution and art, Jan Royt eschews discussion of the destruction of art in iconoclastic revolts and fighting in favor of a thoughtful treatment of intellectual disputes over religious art. Royt explains that pre-Hussite and Hussite reformers had a differentiated relationship to religious art. For example, Mat?j z Janova considered paintings "dead and lifeless" things and advocated the removal of paintings towards which undue respect was shown, but favored the "reasonable use of images in churches" for the edification of the laity (p. 113). Royt also notes that during the Hussite Revolution, in spite of the loss of contact between major artistic centers, artistic production was not altogether disrupted, and many painters and book illuminators remained active in Prague even during the most violent years.

In the final essay, Ern?' Marosi discusses the reign of Sigismund, the last Luxembourg ruler, who occupied the thrones of Bohemia (intermittently) and Hungary (1437) and became Holy Roman Emperor (1433). During the period before Sigismund was able to assume the Bohemian throne due to Hussite violence, Marosi writes that he fortified the imperial residence in Buda and notes examples of Bohemian influence in Hungarian art of the period.

Fajt informs the readers at the beginning of this volume that "Czechs venerate Charles as father of their country, but for Germans he was the stepfather of the Holy Roman Empire" (p. 3). One of the book's virtues is its avoidance of the nationalist problematic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its search for perspective in the context of the late Middle Ages: in a combination of the public and the private, personal piety, "political theology" and "theological politics," and the dynastic struggles between the Luxembourgs, Wittelsbachs, and Habsburgs. The greatest contribution of this work is that it clearly establishes that during the reign of Charles IV until the Hussite Revolution, Prague was a major European artistic and cultural center, just as it was two centuries later during the reign of Rudolf II (1583-1612), a period that has also attracted the attention of international scholarship and was the subject of major exhibits in the 1980s and 1990s.[1] The book also raises interesting questions about artistic regions and the problem of artistic metropolises that demand closer comparison with Prague around 1600.[2] Here too, it would seem, one can ask about the ways in which an imperial court and the diversity of a medium-sized city could serve as catalysts for cultural integration not just within central Europe but Europe as a whole, which made Prague an incubator of the International Gothic, just as it was for the late Renaissance. Whether or not such a discussion takes place, this work on its own merit will be referred to in years to come.

Notes

[1]. Eliška Fu?íková, ed., Prag um 1600. Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolf II., 2 vols. (Freren: Luca, 1988); Fu?íková, ed., Rudolf II and Prague: The Imperial Court and Residential City as Social and Cultural Heart of Central Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997).

[2]. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 154-186.

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Citation: James Palmitessa. Review of Boehm, Barbara Drake; Fajt, Jiri, eds., Prague, the Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13926

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