Oct 24, 2016 - national revival were closely related with neoclassicism, but unlike the majority of the great European literary traditions, Czech literature never ...
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Classical Reception in the Czech Republic
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An Introduction Jan Bažant
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Abstract Around 1000, the Slav population of the Czech lands established close contacts with Western Europe and the process of acculturation was completed by twelfth century. In 1355, the Bohemian king Charles IV was crowned in Rome as Holy Roman Emperor and the capital of the Czech lands, Prague, became one of the main centers of European culture and the classical tradition. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the Czech lands adopted Renaissance humanism and Italian art and architecture and became a center from which classical influences spread to neighboring countries. From the seventeenth century on, the Czech lands followed Western European trends in the reception of ancient Greco‐Roman culture. In the second half of the nineteenth century, classical tradition played an important role in the culture of the Czech national awakening.
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Keywords: Bohemia; classical tradition; Czechs; Holy Roman Empire; Italian Renaissance; Moravia; national awakening; Prague; Renaissance humanism; Western Slavs
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In the European past, self‐conscious and systematic reception of the classical tradition always signaled political ambitions. In the case of the Western Slavs, these ambitions were an import from abroad, initially. The creation of the Eastern Central European states––the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian states––was connected with the first attempt to revive a universal empire, following the example of imperial Rome. From the time of Charlemagne and the Ottonians, Eastern Central Europe was a defense zone destined to protect the revived Roman Empire against Eastern invaders. In the ninth century, the Czechs embraced Christianity, created
A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, First Edition. Edited by Zara Martirosova Torlone, Dana LaCourse Munteanu, and Dorota Dutsch. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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a state, and started to adopt a culture based on Greco‐Roman foundations. A century later, Poles performed these three closely interconnected moves. The territory inhabited by Western Slavs was not part of the ancient Roman Empire, but its new population successfully acculturated itself and established contacts with the classical tradition. In the Middle Ages, Czechs started to profess allegiance to a classical past in order to legitimate their role in shaping the political map of Europe (Bažant 2003: 180). The Western identity of Czechs was defined by Cosmas (c.1045–1125), who wrote, in Latin, the first Czech chronicle. Following Vergil’s Aeneid, Cosmas provided Czechs with a founding myth located northwest of Prague and starring the soothsayer Princess Libuše and Přemysl the Plowman. Přemysl was presented as the mythical founder of the local dynasty. Like the story of Aeneas, Cosmas’s story suggested a state without equal and a dynasty predestined to rule in historical Czech lands, that is, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Not long after Cosmas finished his chronicle, the myth of Přemysl the Plowman was painted on the wall of the rotunda in Znojmo, Moravia (1134–1161), which served as the palace chapel of the local Přemyslid ruler. It was one of the first examples of the newly revived ancient Roman genre of historical representations with heavy political overtones. In the twelfth century, Czechs were active participants in the revival of monumental architecture, sculpture, and painting. The ambitious vision of Czech rulers of the Přemyslid dynasty was perhaps most fully realized in the design of their coinage, in which we observe systematic imitation of classical models. We find here Hercules’ struggle with the Nemean lion, Hydra, and Cacus. Portraits of ruling Přemyslid princes were in the guise of classical‐style heads, with a wreath and a cloak clasped at the shoulder, complete with typical classical conversational gestures. In 1212, Přemysl Otakar I was affirmed as the Czech king, and from that time onward, the Czech ruler, as one of the foremost princes of the Holy Roman Empire, had a key position in electing the emperor. In 1355, the Bohemian king Charles IV was crowned in Rome as the Holy Roman Emperor. It is not in the least surprising that the sculpture of St. George and the Dragon, which was created in 1373 for castle in Prague, was the first equestrian bronze statue created after the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire. Under Charles IV, the Czech lands were one of the main centers of European politics and culture and remained so until the end of the sixteenth century. In 1468, the Trojan Chronicle was published in Pilsen, a Czech translation of the Latin work written by Guido delle Colonne. It had already been translated to Catalan and English, but the Czech translation was written and published simultaneously with the French version. It has traditionally been considered the oldest Czech printed book, and a second edition was published in 1488 in Prague (Urbánková 1970). During the period of Vladislaus II of Jagiellon (1471–1516) and Ferdinand I of Habsburg, who was confirmed Holy Roman Emperor in 1558, the Czech lands
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became a center from which classical influences spread to neighboring countries (Konečný 2003: 193). Vladislaus II introduced Italian Renaissance architecture all’antica to Central Europe and built the first suburban villa in this region. The revival of ancient Roman villa culture in transalpine Europe, however, was connected, above all, with Ferdinand I. During his reign, two villas all’antica were built in Prague and decorated in a style that closely imitated ancient Roman art forms and iconography (Bažant 2006, 2008, 2013a). By that time, culture inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans was in no way a monopoly of the court in historical Czech lands. School plays inspired by classical mythology, for example, were a regular feature in this country. Ancient plays in classical languages appeared here before the first attested attempts elsewhere in transalpine Europe. In the era of Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1611), whose Prague court art represented, in a way, the last phase of Italian Renaissance, humanistic culture flourished in the Czech lands. In 1620, however, the army of the Bohemian Protestant estates was defeated in the famous battle of Bílá Hora (White Mountain) near Prague. The aftermath of this defeat was devastating and long lasting—the Czech state was de facto dissolved in the Habsburg Empire. The Protestant intelligentsia was forced to leave the country, the most important being Jan Amos Komenský, a theologian, philosopher of education, and educational reformer (Beneš, Zemek, and Motel 2008). Inspired by ancient Greek and Roman culture in which visible forms dominated, Komenský was the first to recognize fully the power of images as an aid to learning. His Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The visible world in pictures), published in Latin and German in 1658, was the first schoolbook to use images in language teaching. It was the standard Latin textbook worldwide until the end of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the renewed economic prosperity of the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culture flourished in the Czech lands, and classically inspired art and architecture even acquired distinctively local traits. Architecture in Bohemia, for example, was much more willing than the official imperial Baroque of Austria to break away from accepted practice. In the first half of the eighteenth century, churches in the Czech High Baroque style (also called Radical Baroque of Bohemia) built by Christoph and Kilian Ignác Dientzenhofer were, in fact, the closest transalpine analogies of the so‐called ancient Roman Baroque. In the Czech lands, the classical tradition flourished, especially in aristocratic residences in which Renaissance revival of classical mythology continued with undiminished intensity. Ancient myths and history were the main inspiration source of sculptures, paintings, and musical compositions (Miltová 2009: 78–174; Bažant 2010, 2012a; Kysučan 2013; Miltová 2014). In the Habsburg state, the German language dominated, but despite the Germanization of historical Czech lands, two‐thirds of its population considered Czech their mother language around 1800. Czech was spoken almost exclusively in the villages, but these peasants were ancestors of the liberal townspeople who
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were later instrumental in establishing Czech society, creating Czech culture, and promoting political independence of Czechs. The beginnings of the Czech national revival were closely related with neoclassicism, but unlike the majority of the great European literary traditions, Czech literature never committed to the classical heritage in terms of its program. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the main buildings of the Czech national revival, the National Theatre and the National Museum in Prague, were in neo‐Renaissance style. Czech national revival used the classical tradition to present the Czech nation as conforming in every aspect to high European s tandards (Svoboda 1957). In the nineteenth century, however, the fragmenting of society in the Czech lands resulted in three versions of “classical heritage,” that of the Czech national renaissance, that of Czech German culture, and that with which the Habsburg state identified itself in its official culture. The neo‐Renaissance National Theatre and National Museum were, in fact, only built after the completion of the splendid Prague villa built in 1872 by industrialist Adalbert Lanna. Lanna was Bohemian German. In its decoration, classical myths were used as vehicles to celebrate his business activities, his important social status and cultural mission (Bažant 2014: 29–50, 67–74). For this, we find no counterpart in the Czech national revival. This plurality is in no way surprising. In European history, individual renaissances and renascences of Greco‐Roman culture differed not only in time and space, but also in the social class or national community that started it. In 1918, the independent Czechoslovak Republic was proclaimed, university professor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk became its first president, and the reception of classical tradition received a new impulse (Bažant 2009). The reconstruction of the seat of the Czechoslovak president, Prague Castle, which Masaryk initiated, provided the image of the new state. Masaryk’s architect, Josip Plečnik from Slovenia, rebuilt the castle, in which rulers of the Czech lands had resided since the ninth century, in an original and very creative style inspired by ancient Greece and Rome (Bažant 2012b, 2013b). In Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic the Czech Sokol (Falcon) movement also flourished. This movement, founded in 1862, explicitly revived the ancient Greek idea of the harmony of body and soul. Between 1948 and 1989, during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, so‐ called socialist realism was imported from Soviet Russia. This canon, which became the exclusive artistic norm in the 1950s, had its roots in neoclassicism, but its creations were pompous and unimaginative, especially in architecture. During the communist era the idea of the Czech Sokol movement was abused in the form of the so‐called “Spartakiáda,” a mass athletic exercise bearing the name of Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in ancient Rome. The classical tradition was exploited not only by the totalitarian state but also by its opponents. In communist Czechoslovakia, censorship was a very effective tool of state control, but it was not possible to censor classical authors, the pillars of European culture. In 1969, an ambitious program of publishing ancient Greek and Roman authors in Czech
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translations with commentaries was launched. In the series “Antická knihovna” (“Classical library”) almost a hundred volumes were published. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the Czech state proclaimed a return to the legacy of Masaryk’s republic, but its classicist flavor was not revived. In several monumental projects realized recently in Poland and Hungary, the classical language of architecture was used to stress the links with the common European heritage. Nothing comparable can be found in the Czech Republic, as the state has been called from 1992, when the independent Slovak state was established. In contemporary Czech culture where utilitarianism reigns, the conspicuous absence of allusions to the classical tradition may perhaps be linked to the Euroskepticism prevailing in the political representation of this country. There are two general works on the classical tradition in Czech culture which readers may find useful: Varcl (1978) and Bažant (1982).
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Bažant, Jan, et al. 1982. Antické tradice v českém umění. Prague: Národní galerie. Bažant, Jan. 2003. The Classical Tradition in the Czech Medieval Art. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Bažant, Jan. 2006. Pražský Belvedér a severská renesance. Prague: Academia. Bažant, Jan. 2008. “Villa Star in Prague.” ARS 41: 55–72. Bažant, Jan. 2009. “A Pharmacy and classical tradition in Prague in 1934.” In Art Déco, Kubismus, Neoklassizismus und die Antike, edited by Fritz Blakolmer and Jan Bouzek, 54– 58. Prague: FF UK. Bažant, Jan. 2010. “Andromeda’s Liberation in Monastery. Kosmas Damian Asam’s Fresco Painting at Břevnov (1726) Revisited.” Eirene 46: 234–249. Bažant, Jan. 2012a. “The Message of Statues of circa 1737 in the Courtyard of Hořovice Château.” Eirene 48: 175–196. Bažant, Jan. 2012b. “Plečnik, President, and Hippodrome.” Zbornik za umetnostno zgodovino 48: 153–164. Bažant, Jan. 2013a. “‘Hvězda’ in Prague as a Classical Villa.” Eirene 49: 155–175. Bažant, Jan. 2013b. “Plečnik, Prague, and Palatin.” ARS 46: 51–74. Bažant, Jan. 2014. Villa Lanna in Prague. Prague: Academic Bulletin ASCR. Beneš, Jiří, Petr Zemek, and Beate Motel, eds. 2008. Studien zu Comenius und zur Comeniusrezeption in Deutschland. Festschrift für Werner Korthaase zum 70. Geburtstag. Uherský Brod, Muzeum J.A. Komenského. Konečný, Lubomír. 2003. “Augustine Käsenbrot of Olomouc, His Golden Bowl in Dresden, and the Renaissance Revival of ‘Poetic’ Bacchus.” Artibus et historiae 24: 185–197. Kysučan, Lubor. 2013. “Antika v Baroku: kulisa nebo živý pramen.” Graecolatina‐Brunensia 17: 95–109. Miltová, Radka. 2009. Mezi zalíbením a zavržením. Recepce Ovidiových Metamorfóz v barokním umění v Čechách a na Moravě. Brno: Barrister & Principal. Miltová, Radka. 2014. “Ovidian Iconography in 17th‐Century Ceiling Painting in Bohemia and Moravia and Its European Context.” In Barocke Kunst und Kultur im Donauraum,
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edited by Karl Möseneder, Michael Thimann, and Adolf Hofstetter, 513–523. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag. Svoboda, Karel. 1957. Antika a česká vzdělanost od obrození do první války světové. Prague: Československá Akademie věd. Urbánková, Emma. 1970. “Nejstarší prvotisky českého původu.” In Knihtisk a kniha v českých zemích od husitství do Bílé hory, edited by František Šmahel, 15–59. Prague: Academia. Varcl, Ladislav, ed. 1978. Antika a česká kultura. Prague: Academia.
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