To a Western visitor Prague today gives the impression of almost limitless exuberant Baroque architecture and art, interrupted here and there by drab reminders of the present totalitarian regime. The capital of Czechoslovakia remains a fading but still dramatically beautiful city, stretched over several hills along the Vltava River valley and dominated by the Prague Castle. It is easy to agree with Alexander von Humboldt, who early in the last century declared Prague, together with Naples and Lisbon, to be one of the three most beautiful cities in the world.
One would think that the monuments and traces of Prague's origin and growth in the ninth to the twelfth centuries would be irretrievably buried by time and the masonry of succeeding ages. But as with many superficial observations, this is far from the truth. For the cognoscenti among art lovers and historians, Prague is prime ground for any study of Romanesque architecture. The Czech capital is a source of unparalleled richness and diversity. It is the place to study the origins of early European medieval urbanization. The number of extant Romanesque secular stone dwellings, for example, exceeds all other such European remains put together several times over. Yet no specialized or even general history of medieval art and architecture in English even mentions this highly important heritage. In addition, because of the political vicissitudes of the postwar era, nothing substantial has been published in the West by Czechoslovak art historians (except in German). All available special studies and archaeological reports dealing with the oldest parts of Prague exist so far only in Czech.
Unique Edifices
Most unique and least known internationally are the stone dwellings of twelfth-century Romanesque Prague. Western European historians discussing Romanesque architecture always refer to surviving works in England (Lincoln), in France (Dijon, Cluny), in Belgium (Tournai), in Italy (Venice, San Gimignano), and in Germany (Bamberg, Cologne), which implicitly suggests that secular architecture built in stone came to eastern central Europe only with the advent of the fully developed Gothic style, if not later. Compared to these western European buildings (in the case of France, heavily and not always entirely faithfully restored), Prague alone has some one hundred known examples of Romanesque dwellings, surpassing in scope and diversity anything in the rest of Europe. These examples, moreover, are almost intact, untouched by any attempts, for better or worse, at modern restoration.
Prague (in Czech, Praha) seems to have begun as a city sometime around A.D. 870; the first baptized Czech ruler was Borivoj, circa 884. The first known building in stone in Prague--mentioned in the earliest chronicles (discovered during archaeological excavations undertaken between 1948 and 1951)--was the simple one-nave church of St. Mary, built opere romano on the highest promontory of the Hradcany (Castle Hill). This church was torn down during fierce struggles with those of Borivoj's subjects who still clung to paganism. It was subsequently rebuilt around A.D. 900 by his son Spytihnev I. During succeeding years the entire rocky hill was fortified with an exterior wall, built of the locally abundant white-grey stone known as opuka. Thus the stage for the dramatic rise of the Hradcany was set.
From the end of the ninth century to the present, the city of Prague has been indisputably at the
...
Read Full Article
|
