Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (53 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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It was Goethe who described the episode, in which the Thirty Years’ War at its very end returned to its place of origin, in a piece of ceremonious
prose, but he was happily unaware of what it really meant that the inhabitants of Prague courageously fought against a Swedish army in which many distinguished Czech exiles continued to serve; after thirty years of brainwashing, the valiant defenders did not know exactly who was friend or foe. The Hapsburg dynasty was tremendously pleased; Ferdinand III gave the Jewish community a festive banner with the Star of David and a Jewish hat, and graciously allowed the Old Town to modify its coat of arms: traditionally, it had shown three towers and an open, empty town gate, and now in the gate appeared a powerful arm drawing an unsheathed sword against the enemy. Franz Kafka wrote a thoughtful short prose meditation about this revised Old Town coat of arms and revised it once again, speaking of a fist (not a sword) and, whether he knew of the historical circumstances or not, suggesting that a giant fist one day would smash the city whose inhabitants were so fickle and inconstant.
The most powerful man of Prague’s Jewish community was, after Mordecai Maisel’s demise, the financier Jacob Bassevi, who, together with his brother, had arrived in Prague from Verona in 1590. Taking many more risks than conservative Meisel, Bassevi served three emperors well and enjoyed more privileges than anybody else ever did; in 1622, he was the first Prague Jew to be ennobled, and duly received a coat of arms and the title “von Treuenburg” (of Loyalburg). He built himself a palatial dwelling, the pride of the community (it was razed three hundred years later), but he was also viewed as warmhearted and compassionate, providing his fellow citizens with a new bathhouse, a hospital, and the Grossenhof Synagogue (destroyed by urban modernization in the late nineteenth century). His power was the ultimate cause of his downfall: when the emperor needed cash for his armies, he sold the royal right to coin silver money to a consortium of powerful Bohemian nobles chaired by Karl of Liechtenstein, who had been in charge of the tribunals of revenge, the Dutch economist Hans de Witte, and Jacob Bassevi of Treuenburg; these last two were asked to take care of the economic and technical procedures. The price of silver rapidly rose, and the consortium interpreted the original contract in a way rather convenient to its own interests: it issued infamous “long coins,” short on silver, resulting in catastrophic private losses (especially catastrophic when one was forced to sell for religious or political reasons) and public bankruptcy. As long as Liechtenstein lived, Bassevi was protected, but when Liechtenstein died in 1627, the Jew Bassevi became the fall guy and spent many weeks in prison. He was fortunate to be able to escape to the Bohemian territories of the duke
of Wallenstein, who immediately made him his efficient minister of finance. But Wallenstein, who had conspired against the emperor, was murdered by a gang of loyalist killers, and Bassevi died in the same year (1634). It took another 150 years before a Hapsburg ennobled a Jewish financier again.
The magnificence of Prague Baroque architecture, perhaps more noticeable to travelers from the north, west, or overseas than to those from Rome, Naples, or Venice, has often been related, especially by later Czech patriots, to the military victory of the Hapsburgs, the terror of the re-Catholicization, and the taste of Jesuits and foreign noblemen building new town residences in a more or less occupied territory. But the contradictions of a historical moment cannot be so easily defined by these nineteenth-century simplifications. It is true, of course, that the victory of the Hapsburgs, the triumph of Spanish imperial policies, favored the immigration of Catholic nobles who had served the Viennese court well, but it is equally true that the outstanding military leaders of the Bohemian revolt—the Schlicks, Count Thum, and the South Tyrolean Colonna of Völz (who died of a wound in the field)—were not exactly Czechs; of the immigrant nobles settling in Prague and Bohemia in the decades after 1620, many distinguished families, for instance the Schwarzenbergs, came fully to share the historical vicissitudes of the ancient Czech nobility; centuries later the Nazi occupation was an acid test of its loyalties. The label of “foreign nobility”
(cizácká šlechta
), extremely convenient when dispossessing real estate or refusing restitution of old property rights, is less useful in looking at Baroque Prague.
Historians of Prague architecture agree that the Italian Baroque arrived in Prague before the Battle of the White Mountain, and that its French and Austrian versions flourished far into the eighteenth century. The first constructions in the new style were the oval-shaped Italian chapel in the Jesuit Clementinum, the Church of the Holy Trinity, probably built by Giovanni Filippi (1611-13) and originally used by German Lutherans and later by the Carmelite order, and, most visible, the elaborate Gate of the Emperor Matthias (1614), through which nowadays most tourists enter Hrad
any Castle. Not long after the executions and expropriations, a new wave of Baroque construction began in Prague and changed many medieval squares and streets in a monumental way. It was
sustained by the new most powerful and richest nobles and by the commitments of returning Jesuits and other, newly arrived orders; they all competed for the services of Carlo Luragho, Francesco Carrotti, Domenico Orsi, and others, as well as their clans of architectural assistants and expert plasterers. Albrecht of Waldstein, later to be Generalissimo Wallenstein, still favored by the emperor, immediately wanted a representative palace in the Minor Town, and he razed twenty-six old houses, three gardens, and a brick factory to create enough space for an imposing building; it hides a graceful loggia with many artistic features behind a forbidding facade that recalls a stern military barrack. He was impatiently followed in 1631 by Pavel Michna of Vacínov, who had made a fortune supplying the imperial army and decided to transform a small villa near the river into a huge, unwieldy palace to satisfy all the wishes of a nouveau riche. It was planned on such a grandiose scale that its artful interior was not yet finished a generation later (the building now houses the gymnasts’ association).
At about the same time, the Jesuits began to transform the old Clementinum into a large compound of churches, chapels, libraries, colleges, a theater, an observatory, printing shops, and a magnificent refectory (later the main reading room of the National Library, in which I have spent many pleasant months as a young student and as an old professor). They also settled in the Minor Town and in the New Town, where they built the imposing church of St. Ignatius and another college (destroyed by an American air raid in February 1944). Among the early and exquisite achievements of the Prague international Baroque is the Loretto, a pious Prague imitation of the Santa Casa, the holy habitation in which Mary lived and received the Annunciation (miraculously transferred from Palestine to Loreto, in Italy); the Prague shrine was later surrounded by a cloister, a church of the Nativity, and many chapels. By the later 1650s and 1660s, the noble families, old and new, joined the Baroque construction boom and built their town palaces at Hrad
any or downtown—the Nostitzes, the Kolovrats, the Czernins (the original plans possibly sketched by the great Roman architect Bernini), and at least forty others. Among the experts, architects of other nations begin to appear—Jean Baptiste Mathey from Dijon, who built the castle at Troja and had great troubles with the masons’ guild because he did not speak Czech; and František Maximilián Ka
ka, a gifted Czech born in the Old Town. In the mid-1680s, the Dientzenhofer family, originally from Aibling in Bavaria, settled in Prague, and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer finished the Church of St. Nicholas (originally begun by his father), among other distinguished projects,
and crowned it with a magnificent dome, considered by many, including the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who otherwise did not have much of a historical sense), to be the true symbol of Baroque Prague.
Rudolf II had always hesitated to ally himself too closely with Spanish intransigents, but his successors, especially Ferdinand II, had fewer qualms, and Spanish orientations were all the rage among the victorious. Fashion long preceded politics; the
gorguera,
or the artfully folded white collar, had been worn by elegant people since the mid-sixteenth century, and Prague tailors had to learn how to make a black
capa,
kept longer in Prague than in Madrid because of the unfriendly weather. The Spanish party had long congregated in the salon of Maria Manrique de Lara, who, in spite of some family trouble with the church (the Inquisition condemned her Italian mother because of her contacts with Neapolitan heretics), married Vratislav of Pernštejn, high chancellor of the kingdom of Bohemia after 1565, and her palace was always open to traveling Catholic dignitaries, successive Spanish ambassadors, and scions of the Czech nobility. There were a few scandals and a good deal of flirting; of the eleven living daughters of the house, only four married according to their station (important because their mother later faced financial ruin), and the Spanish ambassador Guillén de San Clemente, a lean Catalan, reported in a nice letter to his sovereign that in de Lara’s salon “his sensualities were pulled hither and thither, and he was rescued only by his reason.″
Maria’s extraordinary daughter Polyxena had inherited her mother’s fine political sense, and even Protestant observers were willing to remark on her independence of mind, keen insight, and unusual courage when it came to expressing her views shared by a few friends and opposed by many. She married twice, both times to the most powerful men of the realm: in 1587 Vilém of Rožmberk, owner of rich lands in southern Bohemia, friend of artists and supporter of traveling alchemists including Dee and Kelley; and then Zden
k Popel of Lobkovic in 1603, high chancellor, moderate leader of the Catholic party for at least two decades, but not necessarily popular in Vienna after 1618. We know deplorably little about Polyxena’s experiences, ambitions, and frustrations, but her sympathies for the Order of the Spanish Barefoot Carmelites who came to Prague in 1624 are irrevocably inscribed in the Baroque traditions of Prague.
Ferdinand II had promised Dominicus à Gesù Maria, general of the Carmelite order (who had preached to the imperial troops on the White Mountain), that the Carmelites, of the new and stricter branch, would be welcome in Vienna and Prague, and he stood by his word punctiliously.
In Prague it was, as usual, a matter of confiscation; the Lutheran clergy had been expelled in 1622 and their Church of the Holy Trinity in the Minor Town was now handed over to the Spanish newcomers. Paradoxically it was one of the first Baroque churches in Prague, built with the financial support of Rudolf’s Protestant friend Duke Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig. The Carmelites moved in on September 7, 1624, and rededicated the edifice to St. Mary of the Victory and St. Anthony of Padua. A new facade was constructed, and a year later a cloister was added, financed this time by the Spanish army general de Huerta.
Polyxena of Lobkovic may have supported the Jesuits early in her life but in her later years she favored the Carmelites, who lived an ascetic life of silence and solitude; when, after the death of her second husband, she went north from Prague to Roudnice Castle, on the Elbe River, she gave to the Barefoot Carmelites a sculpture of the infant Jesus, an heirloom of the de Lara family, which became one of the glories and wonders of Catholic Prague. It was a wood-and-wax copy (the lower part protected by plates of silver) of a little statue of the infant, created after an original in a cloister somewhere between Córdoba and Seville; it had been acquired by Polyxena’s grandmother and then passed on as a wedding gift from mother to daughter. When Polyxena donated it in 1628 to the Carmelites at St. Mary of the Victory, she wrote that she “was giving to them what was most precious to her”; she added that as long as it protected the little statue, the order had nothing to fear. It was true, or so it seemed: the church and the cloister were spared the worst when Saxons and, later, Swedes occupied the Minor Town; and though the Carmelites made a sufficient living by producing an
aqua melissae
(useful against aches and pains) and noble benefactors were not lacking, the little dresses made of gold thread and decorated with pearls that were donated in adoration, and the many miracles, private and public, reported, helped the cult of the infant to spread from Prague to Catholic Austria and, in the course of the nineteenth century, to Spanish America. The German Lutherans of Prague would have been appalled to know that their church became the cradle of a Catholic cult radiating through the Hapsburg lands, to Europe and overseas, through the ages.
The Baroque mysticism of the Prague Counter-Reformation has not been long and widely studied. The spiritual and secular literature of the seventeenth-century Baroque was the international discovery of a generation preceding World War I, and Czech historiography, with strong Protestant and liberal traditions, was not particularly eager to explore the Spanish strain in sixteenth-century Bohemian society and culture. Bohdan
Chudoba, one scholar who did so, died in exile, and the historian Zden
k Kalista was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for “high treason” in 1951. The mystical Prague Baroque has its most legendary figure in Maria Electa di Gesù, or Caterina Tramazolli from Temi, in Italy, who became a Carmelite nun when she was twenty-two, served her order for twenty-seven years in Vienna and Graz, and in 1656 was charged by her superiors to establish a cloister of women in Prague; she served the new institution as its prioress until she died in 1663 and was long venerated by the Carmelites and their friends. Many stories preserved in Italy and in Prague attest to her strict obedience to the rules given by Theresa of Avila, responsible for the reform of the order, and Maria’s ecstatic prayers expecting Christ in the Eucharist show the fervid intensity of her feelings. “Come, O good Jesus! Come, my beloved! … Come thou whom my soul loves;
toties te intra me sumere decidero. Inveni quem diligit anima mea … tenebo eum et nunquam nunquam nunquam dimittam!
I want to keep him … and I will never never never let him go!” The Carmelite sisters so much revered Maria Electa that they exhumed her body and placed the corpse (not much changed, it is said) on a chair at the common table and, later, in a little attic (they had trouble with the head because, when exhuming the body, they had broken her neck). The pious, especially women of the nobility, came from near and far to see the miracle, and it was, perhaps, less than miraculous that the memory of the Prague Carmelite nuns survived in the poems and stories of two decadent Prague writers of the
fin de siècle
: Rilke and Ji
í Karásek of Lvovice, the one writing in German and the other in Czech, were attracted by the silent nuns, and sensed in their speechless ecstasies sweet and untold sexual repressions. These feelings may have been, largely, literary inventions (Rilke was about twenty-five years old and Karásek worked at the post office dreaming up rare orgies), but fashionable audiences liked that, around 1900.

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