Art and Architecture

The Prague-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke called Prague “an epic poem of architecture”, and the city’s location at a crossroads of European culture has left it with an extraordinarily rich and varied legacy not only of building but of all forms of art.

In some periods Prague and Bohemia have been at the forefront of artistic development. In others international trends have been adapted to local circumstances, while periods of provincial isolation and stagnation have had the incidental effect of perpetuating or preserving the achievements of previous eras. In the 14C, Charles IV made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, stimulating a glorious flowering of Gothic creativity in painting, sculpture, architecture and even engineering and town planning, a phase brought to an abrupt halt by the Hussite troubles of the early 15C. In the late 16C and early 17C eccentric Emperor Rudolf II brought artists, alchemists and adventurers from all over Europe to his court, making it a glittering centre of Mannerist culture. The 1620 Battle of the White Mountain may have been a political disaster for the Bohemian nation, but the Counter-Reformation brought with it a wave of Late Renaissance and especially Baroque artistic production rarely equalled elsewhere in Europe. Quieter times followed, but as national consciousness grew in the 19C, Czech pride expressed itself in monumental public building in historicist styles, followed by an effusion of Art Nouveau art and architecture which made the city one of the centres of the Central European Secession style. Cubism flourished too, including a uniquely Czech Cubist contribution to architecture. Then, with the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia, Prague became one of the focal points of Modernist endeavour in all spheres of art, although it is only since the fall of Communism that the Czech heritage of for example Functionalist architecture or Surrealist painting has begun to enjoy the wide appreciation it deserves.