A Time of Gifts (36 page)

A spell hangs in the air of this citadel—the Hradcvany, as it is called in Czech; Hradschin in German—and I was under its thrall long before I could pronounce its name. Even now, looking at photographs of the beautiful lost city, the same spell begins to work. There was another heirloom of the old Bohemian kings hard by the cathedral: the church of St. George, whose baroque carapace masked a Romanesque church of great purity. The round arches that we call Norman plunged through bare and massive walls, flat beams bore up the ceiling; and a slim, gilt mediaeval St. George gleamed in the apse as he cantered his charger over the dragon's lanced and coiling throes. He reminded me of that debonair stone banneret at Ybbs. It was the first Romanesque building I had seen since those faintly remembered Rhenish towns between Christmas and the New Year.

And, at this very point, confusion begins. The city teems with wonders; but what belongs where? Certainly that stupendous staircase
called the Riders' Steps, and all that lay beyond them, were part of the great castle-palace. The marvellous strangeness of the late gothic vaults enclosing this flight must have germinated in an atmosphere like the English mood which coaxed fan-tracery into bloom. The Winter Queen, in her brief snowy reign, was equally astonished, perhaps; her English renaissance upbringing—those masques and their fantastic stage-sets by Inigo Jones—may have been a better preparation. I kept thinking of her as I peered up. These vaults are almost impossible to describe. The ribs burst straight out of the walls in V-shaped clusters of springers. Grooved like celery stalks and blade-shaped in cross section with the edge pointing down, they expanded and twisted as they rose. They separated, converged again and crossed each other and as they sped away, enclosed slender spans of wall like the petals of tulips; and when two ribs intersected, they might both have been obliquely notched and then half-joggled together with studied carelessness. They writhed on their own axes and simultaneously followed the curve of the vault; and often, after these contorted intersections, the ribs that followed a concave thrust were chopped off short while the convex plunged headlong and were swallowed up in the masonry. The loose mesh tightened as it neared the rounded summit and the frantic reticulation jammed in momentary deadlock. Four truncated ribs, dovetailing in rough parallelograms, formed keystones and then broke loose again with a wildness which at first glance resembled organic violence clean out of control. But a second glance, embracing the wider design, captured a strange and marvellous coherence, as though petrifaction had arrested this whirling dynamism at a chance moment of balance and harmony.

Everything here was strange. The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostrich-plumes under
the freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep the bright paint that spiralled them unchipped. But in King Vladislav's vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close to the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling: parting, crossing, re-joining, and—once again—enclosing those slim subdivided tulips as they climbed. Then they cast their intertwining arcs in wider and yet wider loops with the looseness and the overlap of lassoos kept perpetually on the move, accelerating, as they ascended, to the speed of coiling stockwhips... Spaced out along the wide ridge of the vault, their intersections composed the corollas of marguerites and then fled away once more into wider patterns that needed another shift of focus to apprehend. Travelling the length of that arched vista of ceiling, the loops of the stone ribs expanded and crossed and changed partners, simultaneously altering direction and handing on the succession of arcs until the parabolas, reaching the far limit of this strange curvilinear relay-race, began to swing back. Nearing home and completing the journey in reverse, they re-joined their lost companions at their starting point and sank tapering and interlocked. The sinuous mobility entranced the eye, but it was not only this. Lit by the wintry chiaroscuro of the tall windows, the white tulip-shaped expanses that these stone ribs enclosed so carelessly seemed to be animated by an even more rapid and streamlined verve. Each of these incidental and sinuous facets reflected a different degree of white, and their motion, as they ascended the reversed half-cones of the vault and curled over into the ceiling, suggested the spreading and upward-showering rush of a school of dolphins leaping out of the water.

It was amazing and marvellous. I had never seen anything like it. One can imagine a draughtsman twiddling arcs and marguerites with his compass and elaborating them for fun in vast symmetrical tangles—only to push them aside with a sigh. It is the high-spirited audacity of their materialization that turns everything to wonder. Hans was telling me as I gazed how Count
Thurn and a party of Protestant nobles had tramped under these vaults on the way to their fateful meeting with the councillors of the Holy Roman Emperor, all in full armour: the word ‘armour' suddenly offered a solution. It seemed, all at once, the apt analogy and the key to everything here. The steel whorls and flutings, those exuberant wings of metal that adorned the plate-armour of Maximilian's Knights! Carapaces which, for all their flamboyance and vainglory, withstood mace-blows and kept out arrows and the points of swords and lances. In the same way the flaunting halls and the seven hundred rooms of this castle have maintained thousands of labyrinthine tons of Kafka masonry against fire and siege for centuries. These vaults and these stairways were concave three-dimensional offshoots of the Danubian breakout, and shelter for Landsknechts. Altdorfer's world!

Heraldry smothered the walls and the vaults that followed. Shield followed painted shield and aviaries and zoos and aquaria supplied the emblems that fluttered and reared and curvetted among the foliage on the helmets. We were in the very heart of the Landsknecht century. Reached by a spiral, the last of these castle-interiors was an austere and thick-walled room, roofed with dark beams and lit by deeply embrased leaded windows; a sturdy old table was set on the waxed flag-stones. It was in this Imperial aulic council chamber, on May 23, 1618, that Thurn and those mail-clad Czech lords had pressed their claims on the Imperial councillors and broken the deadlock by throwing them out of the window. The Defenestrations of Prague were the penultimate act before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The last was the arrival of the Elector Palatine and his English Electress to be crowned.
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It was time to seek out one of the wine cellars we had noticed on the way up.

* * *

I climb about the steep city in retrospect and re-discover fragments one by one. There are renaissance buildings, light arcaded pavilions and loggias on slim Ionic pillars that could have alighted here from Tuscany or Latium, but the palaces on the squares and the citadel and the steep wooded slopes belong to the Habsburg afternoon. Troops of Corinthian pillars parade along half-façades of ashlars rusticated like the nail-head patterns on decanters, and symbols and panoplies overflow the pediments. Branching under processions of statues, shallow staircases unite before great doorways where muscle-bound Atlantes strain under the weight of the lintels, and the gardens underneath them are flocked by marble populations. Nymphs bind their collapsing sheaves, goddesses tilt cornucopias, satyrs give chase, nymphs flee, and tritons blow fanfares from their twirling shells. (The snow in the folds of their flying garments and the icicles which seal the lips of the river gods are there till spring.) Terraces climb the hillside in a giant staircase and somewhere, above the frosty twigs, juts a folly like a mandarin's hat; it must have been built about the time when
Don Giovanni
was being composed a mile away. Looking-glass regions succeed each other inside the palaces—aqueous reaches under vernal and sunset pastorals where painters and plasterers and cabinet-makers and glaziers and brasiers have fused all their skills in a silence that still seems to vibrate with fugues and passacaglias and the ghosts of commiserating sevenths.

Where, in this half-recollected maze, do the reviving memories of the libraries belong? To the Old University perhaps, one of the most ancient and famous in Europe, founded by the great King Charles IV in 1384. I'm not sure. But I drive wedge-shaped salients into oblivion nevertheless and follow them through the recoiling mists with enfilading perspectives of books until bay after bay coheres. Each of them is tiered with burnished leather bindings and gold and scarlet gleam on the spines of hazel and chestnut and pale
vellum. Globes space out the chessboard floors. There are glass-topped homes for incunables. Triangular lecterns display graduals and antiphonals and Books of Hours and coloured scenes encrust the capitals on the buckled parchment; block-notes and lozenges climb and fall on four-line Gregorian staves where the Carolingian uncials and blackletter spell out the responses. The concerted spin of a score of barley-sugar pillars uphold elliptic galleries where brass combines with polished oak, and obelisks and pineapples alternate on the balustrades. Along the shallow vaulting of these chambers, plasterwork interlocks triangular tongues of frosty bracken with classical and allegorical scenes. Ascanius pursues his stag, Dido laments the flight of Aeneas, Numa slumbers in the cave of Egeria and all over the ceiling draped sky-figures fall back in a swoon from a succession of unclouding wonders.

Floating downhill, memory scoops new hollows. Churches, echoing marble concavities dim as cisterns in this cloudy weather, celebrate the Counter-Reformation. Plinths round the floor of rotundas hoist stone evangelists aloft. With robes spiralling in ecstasy and mitres like half-open shears, they hover halfway up the twin pillars from whose acanthus-tops the dome-bearing semi-circles fly. In one of these churches, where the Tridentine fervour had been dulled by two centuries of triumph, there were saints of a less emphatic cast. The figure of St. John the Divine—imberb, quizzically smiling, quill in hand and at ease in a dressing-gown with his hair flowing loose like an undress-wig, he might be setting down the first line of
Candide
instead of the Apocalypse; perhaps the sculptor has confused his Enlightenments. Seen from a fountain-square of the Hradcvany, the green copper domes, where each snow-laden segment is pierced with a scrolled lunette, might belong to great Rome itself. The pinnacles on all the cupolas are tipped with monstrances shooting rays like golden fireworks; and when these and the gold balls on the tips of the other finials are touched by a rare sunbeam, the air glitters for a moment with a host of flying baubles.

* * *

A first glance, then, reveals a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars. It celebrates the Habsburg marriage-claims to the crown of Bohemia and reaffirms the questionable supercession of the old elective rights of the Bohemians; and alongside the Emperor's temporal ascendancy, this architecture symbolizes the triumph of the Pope's Imperial champion over the Hussites and the Protestants. Some of the churches bear witness to the energy of the Jesuits. They are stone emblems of their fierce zeal in the religious conflict. (Bohemia had been a Protestant country at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. It was Catholic once more at its close and as free of heresy as Languedoc after the Albigensian crusade, or the sea-shore of oyster-response at the end of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.')
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But in spite of this scene, a renewed scrutiny of the warren below reveals an earlier and a mediaeval city where squat towers jut. A russet-scaled labyrinth of late mediaeval roofs embeds the baroque splendours. Barn-like slants of tiles open their rows of flat dormers like gills—a mediaeval ventilation device for the breeze to dry laundry after those rare washing-days. Robust buildings join each other over arcades that are stayed by the slant of heavy buttresses. Coloured houses erupt at street corners in the cupola-topped cylinders and octagons that I had first admired in Swabia and the façades and the gables are decorated with pediments and scrolls and steps; teams of pargetted men and animals process solemnly round the walls; and giants in high relief look as though they are half immured and trying to elbow their way out. Hardly a street is untouched by religious bloodshed; every important square has been a ceremonious stage for beheadings. The symbolic carved chalices, erased from strongholds of the Utraquist sect of the
Hussites—who claimed communion in both kinds for the laity—were replaced by the Virgin's statue after the re-establishment of Catholicism. Steel spikes, clustered about with minor spires, rise by the score from the belfries of the older churches and the steeples of the riverside barbicans, flattened into sharp wedges, are encased in metal scales and set about with spikes and balls and iron pennants. These are armourers' rather than masons' work. They look like engines meant to lame or hamstring infernal cavalry after dark. Streets rise abruptly; lanes turn the corners in fans of steps; and the cobbles are steep enough to bring down dray-horses and send toboggans out of control. (Not now; the snow has been heaped in sooty banks, deep and crisp but uneven; the real Wenceslas weather was over.)

These spires and towers recalled the earlier Prague of the Wenceslases and the Ottokars and the race of the Prvemysl kings, sprung from the fairy-tale marriage of a Czech princess with a plough-boy encountered on the banks of the river. The Czechs have always looked back with longing to the reigns of the saintly sovereign and of his descendants and to the powerful and benevolent Charles IV—a golden age when Czech was the language of rulers and subjects, religious discord unknown and the rights of crown and nobles and commons and peasants all intact. These feelings gained strength during the Czech revival under the last hundred years of Habsburg ascendancy. Austrian rule fluctuated between unconvinced absolutism and liberalism soon repented and it was abetted by linguistic pressures, untimely inflexibility and all of the follies that assail declining empires, for knavery was not to blame. These ancient wrongs must have lost much of their bitterness in the baleful light of modern times when the only evidence to survive is an heirloom of luminous architectural beauty.