Queen Anna's pleasure house
The summer house of Queen Anne ( Czech Letohrádek královny Anny or Kralovský letohrádek ) or Belvedere ( Belvedér ) formerly known as Mathematical house ( Matematický dům known), is a Renaissance castle on the grounds of Prague Castle . It is one of the most important Renaissance buildings in the Czech capital.
location
The castle is located north of Prague Castle in the Royal Garden ( Královská zahrada, formerly also Castle Garden or Imperial Garden ). It stands on the northern edge of the Hirschgraben ( Jelení příkop ) and separates the eastern end of the Royal Garden from the Chotek Garden ( Chotkovy sady, formerly Volksgarten ). The Královský letohrádek tram stop is nearby . The main entrance is on the north side of Mariánské hradby .
history
The pleasure house was built by the Bohemian King and later Emperor Ferdinand I in the years 1538–1565 in the Italian Renaissance style. The planning was started in 1535, the construction itself began in April 1538 according to a design by the Italian stonemason and architect Paolo della Stella and under the supervision of the Italian master builder Giovanni Spatio . After della Stella had expelled his compatriot Spatio, he replaced him with the builder Giovanni Maria Aostalli . The half-finished building was also destroyed in the fire of 1541, whereupon the emperor stopped construction and left Prague himself. The construction management was resumed in 1548 by Paolo della Stella. After Stella’s death in 1552, Emperor Ferdinand brought the Augsburg city master builder Hans Tirol to the Prague court, but construction was not completed until 1563 after the imperial court master builder Bonifaz Wohlmuth took over the construction management in 1555 . In 1558, the pleasure palace served as a pompous backdrop for the three-day celebrations for the arrival of Ferdinand I as the new emperor.
Even as Archduke, the later Emperor Rudolf II set up his famous observatory in some rooms on the upper floor, in which Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler , among others, also worked. Rudolf himself often took part in astronomical measurements. His famous art and curiosity collection was housed in other rooms on the upper floor . After his brother Matthias came to power, he retired to this building himself in 1611, but died in 1612. After Rudolf's death, the building remained uninhabited. His successor, Emperor Matthias , gradually moved the imperial court and thus the art collections from Prague to Vienna . The parts of this collection brought to Vienna form the historical core of today's Kunsthistorisches Museum . During the occupation of the Lesser Town in Prague by Swedish troops in the last phase of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the astronomical and art collection of the Pleasure House that remained in Prague, which was still rich at that time, was looted. The spoils of war later reached France, and most of its treasures are now in the Louvre in Paris .
In 1782, Emperor Joseph II handed the building over to the imperial artillery , who set up a laboratory here, in which, among other things, gunpowder was produced. It was not until half a century later that the idea of public use of the building came up. In 1836 the Prague Colonel Burgrave Karl Chotek , Gubernial President of the Prague Gubernium , regained the building from the artillery to hold the coronation ceremony of Emperor Ferdinand I (as Ferdinand V, King of Bohemia ). According to the plans of the Viennese architects Bernhard Grueber and Peter von Nobile , the building was completely renovated between 1841 and 1855 and converted into a picture gallery. The interiors were radically remodeled, the entrances relocated, the middle corridor on the ground floor removed and a monumental staircase built in the historicist style in the middle. Between 1850 and 1866 the main hall on the upper floor was painted with twelve historical scenes from the history of Bohemia according to a design by the painter Christian Ruben . The cycle of pictures made by a group of his students at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts was covered after the Second World War and only unveiled and renovated after the fall of communism as a result of the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
The building was renovated in the 1950s under the direction of the Czech architect Pavel Janák . Since then it has been used as an exhibition hall. During a further renovation at the end of the 1980s, a fire broke out in the building's framework, in which the framework and the copper roof were severely damaged. The last complete reconstruction of the building took place in the years 2004–2008. In 1992, the gazebo as part of the World Heritage "Historic Center of Prague" (was Historické centrum Prahy ) in the World Heritage List UNESCO added.
Naming in the mirror of the Czech national movement
Although Ferdinand I had the pleasure palace built for his own stately representational purposes from the beginning, the widespread belief that the building was built for Ferdinand's wife, Queen Anna ( Anna Jagellonská ) has been around since the 19th century .
The reason for this legend was that Anna herself was perceived not as a member of the Austrian Habsburgs , which were increasingly hated and rejected at the time of the national awakening of the Czechs in the 19th century , but as a scion of the Lithuanian-Polish Jagiellonian , a Slavic royal dynasty. The reason for this is the widespread image of Queen Anna Jagellonská as a philanthropist , dating back to the 16th century, who, in contrast to her husband Ferdinand I, was received extremely positively in Czech historiography. Even her untimely death at the beginning of 1547 remains a popular episode in Czech history with the suppression of the class revolt in Bohemia (1547) : According to legend, Anna even prayed for the Czechs on her deathbed.
This led to efforts to transform the pleasure house into a kind of “Czech Valhalla ” and to immortalize the glorious chapter of Czech history in a cycle of historical wall paintings created by Christian Ruben and his students. Believing that this building is a direct and unaffected import of Italian Renaissance architecture that served as a model for the Czech Renaissance as well as the Czech Neo-Renaissance of the 19th century. The building of the Prague National Theater , opened in 1881, is often cited as an example , the appearance of which clearly reflects the main elements of the pleasure palace.
architecture
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From an architectural point of view, it is a pleasure house , ie a form of a castle developed in the courtly culture of the Renaissance, which was used for private pleasure and apart from court ceremonies and state obligations for the organization of festivities, receptions, feasts or balls. Pleasure houses are usually part of larger gardens that are laid out in the vicinity of princely residences. The Prague Lusthaus was also built on the north side of the Hirschgraben opposite the Prague Castle Hill as part of the expansion of the Royal Garden ordered by Ferdinand I. In contrast to the marked by round or polygonal corner towers appearance later erected pleasure houses (like the New Lusthaus from Stuttgart , the Lusthaus Vienna , the Summer Palace star at White Mountain near Prague or New Lusthaus Berlin ) forms the Prague Lusthaus with his Italian influenced, rectangular floor plan and all-round arcade gallery an exception. This design concept was an architectural novelty even in Italy at the time (cf. e.g. the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza) and probably also one of the first renaissance buildings to be realized in the Bohemian countries.
The two-storey, rectangular core of the building is surrounded on all sides by an arcade gallery supported by Ionic columns . The façade surfaces between the arches, the frieze of the entablature , some overhangs and the pillars and balustrade bases are decorated with various reliefs depicting mythological, Christian and historical scenes. The arcade gallery carries a large terrace that surrounds the entire first floor. In addition to the window openings, the facades on the first floor are decorated with blind windows . The roof structure of the building is considered to be a unique carpentry construction and is reminiscent of an inverted ship's hull . Originally, the roof designed by the court architect Wohlmuth was decorated with red and white roof tiles and the symbols of the empire ( the imperial eagle ) and the Bohemian countries ( the double-tailed lion ).
Directly in front of the west facade of the summer house is the Singing Fountain ( Zpívající fontána ), a unique Renaissance fountain, which was also commissioned by Emperor Ferdinand I as part of the expansion of the King's Garden. The masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture designed by the Italian artist Francesco Terzio was cast in bronze by the Brno bell caster Tomáš Jaroš in 1568 , and the fountain has remained intact in its original location ever since. The lower pool is held by four faun figures, the pool edge is decorated with human heads and plant motifs. The deer-bearing figure of the mythological shepherd god Pan appears among the shepherds holding the upper fountain bowl . From the upper pelvic floor, little boys and human heads spit water jets down in the lower pelvis. The bagpipes that crown the upper basin with the bagpiper spews more jets of water. As the water falls into the two basins, the bronze plates vibrate, creating a rhythmic sound that gives the fountain its name. This "music" is quite quiet and can only be heard up close.
Individual evidence
- ^ Jan Bažant: Pražský Belvedér a severská renesance ( The Prague Belvedere and the Renaissance of the North ) . Academia, Praha / Prague 2006, p. 11-20 .
- ↑ Bažant (2006), 219-236.
- ↑ Fergusonová, Kitty: Tycho a Kepler: Nesourodá dvojice, jež jednou provždy změnila náš pohled na vesmír ( Tycho and Kepler: An unequal couple who changed our view of the universe forever ) . Academia, Praha / Prag 2009, ISBN 978-80-200-1713-0 , pp. 296 .
- ^ Antonín Balšánek: Belvedere: Letohrádek Královny Anny na Hradčanech ( Belvedere: Queen Anna's summer palace in Hradčany ). 1891, accessed on July 20, 2020 (cz).
- ^ Martin Horáček: Bernhard Grueber a jeho příspěvek k počátkům novorenesance v Čechách ( Bernhard Grueber and his contribution to the beginnings of the Neo-Renaissance in Bohemia ) . In: Uměni . tape 51 , č 1. Praha / Prague 2003.
- ↑ ČTK: Výstava v letohrádku přibližuje jeho historii i opravy ( The exhibition in the summer palace presents its history and renovations ). In: archiweb.cz. April 30, 2008, accessed on July 20, 2020 (cz).
- ↑ Historic Center of Prague. In: UNESCO World Heritage List. Retrieved July 20, 2020 .
- ↑ Bažant (2006), 32-38
- ↑ Ulrich Schütte: The castle as a fortification . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1994, ISBN 978-3-534-11692-8 , pp. 242 .
- ↑ Bažant (2006), pp. 11-25.
Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ′ 37.6 ″ N , 14 ° 24 ′ 19.2 ″ E