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Prague, four eras of artistic development
An artistic profusion of such breadth and quality is most often nourished by the convergence between several favorable factors over the ages. :
- a euphoria led by the return to stability, to freedom, often after a period of affliction, submission, poverty, war ;
- the availability, the concentration of resources in the hands of a voluntarist, enlightened power, anxious to establish its prestige, usually breaking with the past;
- the advent or resurgence of a flagship identity, of a stifled patriotism or culture, mostly shared by the population, around which the creative talents are flocking.
The case of the baroque is in Prague a kind of counterexample, where the power of a brutal power applies and imposes its art and its rules in the name of religious principles serving a political ambition.
In fact, we can distinguish here as in other large European metropolises, and at the risk of oversimplifying, four major periods in the history of Bohemia and the Czech homeland, which are at the origin of the architectural riches of Prague : Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau.
Le plein Moyen-Âge
Prague, the golden age of the Middle Ages
After 200 years of German rule, the Kingdom of Bohemia in the 12th century became a relatively independent state within the Holy Roman Empire, heir to the Carolingian Empire. ; it even extends south to the Adriatic, with Ottokar II.
Its prosperity also rests in the 13th century on the exploitation of the silver mines in Kutná Hora (fragment of illustration of the " Gradual of Kutna Hora " of the end of the 15th century).
In 1346, by his descent, Charles IV (Wenceslas before becoming Charles) is elected sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire (the 18th after Charlemagne); he takes Prague as its capital, to the detriment of Munich ( ?) ; the same year he also became King of Bohemia.
We notice that the light beard was already worn ...
Since then, under his leadership, Prague took an extraordinary boom and became the 3rd most populous city in the West (the 1st is Paris). The kingdom of Bohemia is at the height of its power. The Czech language is used at his court, with Jan Hus in particular.
Charles IV, a great builder, had the Prague Castle built ... in its necessarily medieval version, the bridge that bears his name today, many churches and the first university of the empire.
He is considered the founder of the Czech Kingdom.
La Renaissance
Prague to the Renaissance
Rudolf II
Portrait of Aachen, 1592
The other prosperous period begins with the return of the Habsburgs from Austria in 1526 who seize Bohemia. The kingdom resists, submits successively and Prague declines.
But Rudolf II, new emperor (the 25th) of the same Holy Roman Empire, takes over Prague as its capital.
Poor warrior, bad administrator, if he does not complete anything of the domineering intentions of the Habsburgs, he is on the other hand a great lover of the arts and "admirer of life and women" (Wikipedia).
Concerning the arts, under his reign from 1583 to 1612, Prague benefited from a new cultural boom marked by the Renaissance.
But a boom stopped in 1620, when the battle of the White Mountain (50,000 troops clash) stifles Czech patriotism and its Protestant elites and engages the famous and murderous Thirty Years' War which affects the whole of Europe.
She ruin in any case for three centuries the hopes of independence of the States of Bohemia.
Battle of the White Mountain
L'époque baroque
The baroque period in Prague
After the rather fierce takeover by the Habsburgs, imperial Catholics against Protestant Czechs, and the end of the Thirty Years' War, which ended with the treaties of Westphalia in 1678, for nearly a century, the baroque art of the Counter-Reformation developed with all its magnificence, its expressiveness, using all the beautiful artistic subterfuges (trompe-l'oeil…), but massive and imposing, while the teaching and the administration are Germanized.
Then the baroque turns towards the middle of the 18th century towards a kind of pragois rococo: an excess of the baroque, but from which he wants to free himself and to which he wants to oppose by its frivolous character, its lightness, its elegance; a sort of refuge for the Prague bourgeoisie, an interior art of living in reaction to the sufferings endured successively by the city. (LE ROCOCO PRAGOIS (1740-1791); on Radio Prague International in French, 2011).
" Rococo is a social feeling, a lifestyle, a certain atmosphere through which the society of the mid-eighteenth century reacts to the new, harsh and ruthless reality: there is a kind of paradox between the life that unfolds in the interior of homes, between their interior decoration aspiring to more lightness, more freedom, and disasters coming from outside.
Prague has been besieged several times, conquered several times, it has had to pay bloody contributions, the population has known hunger, this is the image of the 18th century. " By Václav Ledvinka, Director of the Prague City Archives.
et celle de l'Art Nouveau
Prague and Art Nouveau
With the " Peoples Spring »Throughout Europe and after a new rise in Czech nationalism during the 19th century, where Czechs, Germans and Jews live side by side and compete, Prague is enriched thanks in particular to the industrial revolution in Bohemia. The Czechs were in the majority in the City Council in 1861.
It was then that Art Nouveau appeared, in Prague from 1891, at the Jubilee Exhibition (100 years after one of the 1st European Exhibitions industrial), where the symbolism of Czech patriotism emerging from the Austro-Hungarian grip wanted to assert itself.
Spring"
of the four seasons
"Nature"
After having been the initiator in Paris in particular with famous posters (for the theater, for the advertising display of that time ...) where he represents by sublimating the actress Sarah Bernhardt, his style is propagated in the architecture, with what in this Europe is called the Secession (" Secese ").
Real wonders result in Prague, especially with and in the Municipal House.
Since 2018, it has been hosting its large historical frescoes.
First mocked, decried (noodle style) Art Nouveau is then adored, to be rejected a little later.
"L'âne-art-phabête" finally wonders if there is not some kind of underlying continuity between rococo, Art Nouveau and even Art Deco : the elegance, the delicacy, the lightness of the Art Nouveau decorative motifs, do they not draw a little inspiration from the rococo bourgeois of Prague ?
And the extraordinary interior decorative deployment of a great refinement of Art Nouveau and the materials it uses does not contain certain premises (marquetry, metalwork, crystal, ...) of the future Art Deco which by straightening the curves and by stripping them then comes to react to what some call the excesses of Art Nouveau ?
Complex decorations, but based on regular geometric figures are indeed very frequent, again as a foreshadowing of the industrial geometric austerity of the lines of Art Deco.
One of the most famous promoters of Art Nouveau and its superb inventive exultations is Alphonse Mucha , a talented Czech artist who comes to Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was then a question of breaking with all the previous artistic and architectural canons, in particular with the academists and the Baroque of Central Europe (illustrating the long presence " occupant Austro-Hungarian and counter-reformist for three centuries).
Alphonse Mucha,
self-portrait
He creates this style which exalts and marries, even merges man (especially woman) and nature.
A nationalist convinced of Czech greatness (this central country wedged between Poland to the northeast, Germany to the west, Austria to the south and Slovakia to the southeast), he painted large frescoes which retrace the greatness of the country.
Sarah bernhardt
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