Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (43 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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Though involved in war against the Turks again in the 1550s, Ferdinand I felt strong enough to persecute the religious groups that had been active in opposition to him, and he resolved to reinvigorate Bohemian
Catholicism. The Lutherans once again had to seek the protection of the Utraquists, whose practices were sanctioned by law, and the king’s renewal of the 1508 mandate against the Bohemian Brethren, as well as the arrest of their bishop, Jan Augusta, forced them to leave Prague and Bohemia en masse and to settle in Moravia, rapidly becoming a haven for Jews and Christian dissidents. Ferdinand invited members of the new Jesuit order to Prague, and in April 1556, a group of twelve (mostly Flemish) Jesuits under the guidance of their director, Ursman Guisson, settled in the once Dominican monastery of St. Clemens, in the Old Town. Within six years they had been granted a royal privilege to expand their excellent school—which, ironically, was often attended by sons of the Protestant elite—into a full-fledged Collegium Clementinum, which began to compete with the Utraquist old university, or Collegium Carolinum. Prague had been without an archbishop since the Hussite revolution, when the last incumbent, the Westphalian Konrad of Vechta, had joined the Utraquists in 1421; the pope now appointed Anton
n Brus of Mohelnice, Czech grand master of the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, though he had long favored the chalice and the importance of Czech, much to the displeasure of Rome.
 
Once he had defeated the uprising of the Prague towns and the Protestant Estates, Ferdinand I left Bohemian affairs in the hands of his second son, Ferdinand, who settled at Hrad
any Castle as royal governor for seventeen years before he shifted his residence and his famous art collection to Amras Castle, near Innsbruck, in the Tyrol. He was there to see to it that Vienna’s orders were implemented in Prague, but, excluded as he was from accession to the throne, he was not particularly eager to commit himself to far-reaching quarrels and was not averse to fulfilling the wishes of the Estates—the exception being Jewish policies, since the Estates rigidly opposed Jewish business while the royal governor was far more tolerant for economic reasons. Archduke Ferdinand was internationally known for his secret marriage to beautiful Philippine Welser, daughter of the famous Augsburg banker and one of the richest capitalists in Europe; though she disliked gloomy Hrad
any and preferred to live at K
ivoklát Castle in the romantic forests (in 1834 extolled by the Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha), her husband, who spoke fluent Czech and had access to Welser money, was gratefully remembered for releasing from prison the bishop of the Bohemian Brethren and for his intelligent interest in international art and local Czech painting. He had to have his castle and his hunting lodge too: Hvézda, or Villa Star, was built in 1555-65 in
the royal game park near Prague according to his ideas by the Italians Giovanni Mario Aostalli and Giovanni Lucchese, with local supervision provided by Hans Tirol and Bonifaz Wohlmut. Hvêzda (much admired by the French surrealist André Breton) was designed in the shape of a six-pointed star lacking any outside adornment, but in the true mannerist way it surprises and astonishes the visitor with its surfeit of elaborate stuccos (by Antonio Brocco and collaborators), a magnificent vault rising from the central rotunda, and complex subsidiary spaces on all sides; the ascetic outside reveals nothing of the inside, precious and rich.
When Maximilian II was crowned king of Bohemia in 1562, two years before his father died, Protestants in Prague and elsewhere had high hopes and dared to breathe more easily. He had been educated in Vienna in the Spanish way, but it was known that he sympathized with the Protestant cause and was, perhaps, a Protestant at heart (his father had to remind him that Protestants were excluded from access to the throne). Maximilian II, an avid art collector, mostly resided in Vienna, but he learned his Czech too; when a delegation of Brethren appeared before him in Vienna and discussed their grievances in German, he told them that German, on that occasion, was not needed. He declared in 1575 in rather general terms that he would fully respect the “Bohemian Confession,” a religious protocol compiled by all Protestant groups, but later he reneged on his promise. It has always been difficult to say whether he had a bland or an enigmatic mind, but when he lay in agony he refused to confess or accept the sacraments of the Catholic Church. His funeral in Prague on March 22, 1577, was suddenly disrupted by the panic fear that Catholics and Protestants were ready to kill each other in the streets. The cortege barely made it to St. Vitus Cathedral.
Many historians have loyally worked to establish a sober and balanced account of the achievements of Emperor Rudolf II, but the legends prevail. He has come down to us with the image of a royal Faust or as the mad alchemist on the Bohemian throne; historians are first to admit that his commitment to the arts and his wide philosophical and scientific concerns make him particularly dear to poets, novelists, and expressionist film producers—the legend of “magic Prague,” prepared by English, German, and American writers on their grand tours in the nineteenth century, richly cultivated by Czech and German writers of the
fin de
siècle,
and later
renewed first by French surrealists and then by Czech dissidents under neo-Stalinist rule, largely rests on diffuse clichés about Rudolf’s life and his court. The difficulties of penetrating his mind are forbidding; as ruler, he intended to do good, rarely succeeded, and, ultimately, madly destroyed himself, yet there must be some reason why he invited to Hrad
any so many excellent painters, artists, musicians, and scientists, and why, being a devout Catholic, he welcomed at his court Francesco Pucci, a heretic who roamed all over Europe, Jacobus Palaeologus, a former Dominican, and, above all, Giordano Bruno—all later burned by the Inquisition.
Rudolf, son of Maximilian II and his Spanish wife, Maria (whose mother had died stark mad), did not enjoy a carefree youth. When he was eleven years old, he was sent, together with his brother Ernst, to the Hapsburg court in Madrid to receive his education there (a triumph for his mother and the Spanish faction at the Vienna court). He stayed in Madrid until he was nearly twenty, receiving an excellent training in languages and rhetoric from his mostly Spanish tutors. His household, which may have comprised close to one hundred persons, was supervised by the Austrian noble Adam of Dietrichstein, who wrote glowing letters home to Vienna—one argument he made for keeping Rudolf in Madrid was that he would be in line for the Spanish throne if Prince Don Carlos, who showed signs of mental instability, or so they said, would be unable to reign. For years Maximilian tried to get his son home, and in 1571 he finally succeeded; in a magnificent arrangement, Rudolf and his entourage were brought to Genoa by a flotilla commanded by Don Juan of Austria, who had just smashed the Turkish forces at the celebrated Battle of Lepanto in October, and from Genoa he wended his way home to Vienna. It was not an easy time for Rudolf; his father, hesitant in religious policies and trying to avoid open conflict, and his fiery mother, deeply committed to the Catholic cause, were at odds; he may have rightly felt that he was repeatedly sent to Prague to discuss matters of taxation with the recalcitrant Estates because his father wanted to avoid an outright confrontation with these powers and was using his son as a cover-up in his policy of procrastination. A compromise was reached when Maximilian came to Prague himself and the Estates accepted Rudolf as king of Bohemia. He was crowned on September 22, 1575, at the cathedral, a festive but not particularly glorious affair for either Catholics or Protestants, both well aware of undignified deals and broken promises.
Rudolf was twenty-four years old when he became king of Bohemia, and the eyes of Europe were upon him. He was an excellent linguist,
speaking and writing Spanish, German, French, Latin, Italian, and a little Czech (he had had a Czech tutor, Sebastian Pechovský), but he affected, all his life, the distant and stiff Madrid court manner which Austrians and Bohemians alike found cold and unfeeling. Initially, he seemed willing to enjoy the grand life in Vienna and Prague, and took part in elaborate tournaments, balls, and festive dinners arranged by ambitious Austrian and Czech nobles. However, he had to face many suspicions: the Protestants were appalled by his education at the court of Philipp II while not perceiving its virtues; and the Spanish “party,” including his mother and the papal diplomats who were active again in Vienna and Prague politics, were never fully satisfied by his less than perfect commitment to the Catholic cause and by his attempts to disengage himself cautiously from strict Madrid policies, especially with an eye to restive Protestants in Bohemia and Hungary. The king and the Bohemian Estates for many years showed cautious restraint with each other, avoiding corrosive words and actions; while the king had come from Madrid with strong ideas about the power and majesty of the absolute monarch, the members of the Estates wisely avoided provoking his vulnerable sensibilities. In 1580 he became seriously ill, the court physicians feared the worst, but he slowly recuperated, and in 1583 decided to move his court to Prague. By then he had changed much.
The historian R. J. W. Evans has suggested that Rudolf continued Maximilian’s policies, if they could be called that, for a considerable time when he took over his father’s state machinery. Rudolf diligently attended meetings of the Estates, attempted to liquidate royal debts, tried to revive Bohemian silver mining, and worked to stabilize prices. His religious habits were Catholic in the Spanish way, but he did not want to be dependent on the Spanish party (in response, his mother had left Vienna in a huff for Madrid in 1581, never to return), and, like his father, he preferred the virtues of procrastination, diminishing the possibilities of open conflict. As tradition required, Rudolf accepted the Basel Agreements’ political covenant of Catholics and Utraquists, but he twice renewed the old royal edicts against the Brethren (though the worst was prevented by unified opposition in the Estates) and, in his own way, politically favored the Catholic cause in a country in which 85 percent of the inhabitants were now non-Catholic and five-sixths of the seats in the Estates were held by Protestants. He was adamant as far as his personal royal power was concerned: when the Catholic noble Ji
í Popel of Lobkovic wanted to establish himself as a kind of dictator in the shadow of, or perhaps competing with, the crown, Rudolf had him arrested and sentenced him to prison for life
and loss of all property, without mercy; at about the same time, he favored the Protestant Kryštof Želinský of Sebuzín as vice-chancellor of Bohemia, much to the consternation of the papal ambassadors. In 1598, when renewed war against the Turks for a change went well for Rudolf’s generals, the papal nuncio in Prague, Filippo Spinelli, convinced Rudolf, who now saw himself as Christianity’s imperial savior, that the Protestant administrators had to go, and in 1599 the king appointed a team of Catholic lords, many of the noble Lobkovic family, to run the country, which deeply offended the Protestant majority.
Many darkly attractive stories have been told about Rudolf the magnificent patron of the arts and sciences, yet, among the Hapsburgs, Rudolf was not alone in favoring artists and collecting curiosities. His grandfather Ferdinand I had established the first art collection
(Kunstkammer)
in Vienna; his uncle, the lieutenant general at Hrad
any, had moved his collection of art and armor from Prague to his Tyrolean castle; and his father, Maximilian II, had tried hard if in vain to entice the famous architect Palladio to work in Vienna and had gathered a group of important Italian artists, including Giuseppe Arcimboldo, to work for him as portraitists and architects. Maximilian bequeathed, as it were, his Italians to Rudolf, who continued to support them in Vienna and Prague.
In time, however, the older Italians retired or wanted to go home again, and in the early 1580s, when moving to Hrad
any Castle, Rudolf began to invite to Prague younger Dutch and German artists, all well trained in Italy. Among them, to name only the most important, were Bartholomaus Spranger from Antwerp, Hans of Aachen (actually born in Cologne), the Swiss Joseph Heintz; in time they were joined by Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, Roelandt Savery, the engraver Aegidius Sadeler, and others. By the turn of the century, the group was firmly established at Hrad
any and in the Minor Town, constituting its own little aesthetic universe with close personal ties to Rome, Florence, and Amsterdam. By a special letter of majesty in 1595 they were exempted from the rules of the Prague guild of painters, and received yearly stipends, with all commissions extra. True, the imperial offices were always strapped for cash or late in payments, but when Spranger died in Prague in 1611, he left to his heirs five downtown houses, among other valuables.
The style of Rudolf’s Prague painters has been usually called “late mannerist” to indicate something of their shared interests and techniques—allegorical celebrations of Hapsburg power (Rudolf, who never went to the front, crushing the Turks under his horse’s hooves), encounters of ancient goddesses and gods, heroines and heroes, their stories derived
from Homer and Ovid, the women and men in stark and naked contrast, mild and harsh, sweet Venus and hairy Hephaestos, elegant and oblong bodies of expressive if not serpentine gesture, garlanded by emblems of peace, passion, and poetry. Contemporary observers, especially among the ambassadors from Italy, suggested that Rudolf had a certain taste for the lascivious; in a neo-Latin novel of the time, written by John Barclay, an unfriendly Scottish author, Rudolf appears under the name of Aquilius as a dirty old man shuffling back and forth
(fluxis et titubantibus vestigiis)
in his apartment, the walls of which are decorated with pictures usually ascribed by the ancients to the genre of “Prostitute Paintings.” Yet the paintings done by his group were fully consonant with international taste; even Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn’s unveiled beauties, in the near absence of anything else, are adorned by chains of dark and precious stones, happily separating their proud breasts. They remain perhaps more alive than Spranger’s exquisite theatrical allegories.

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