Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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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 Jií 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 Hradany, 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 Hradany 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 Hradany 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.
The scholar Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, most knowledgeable about Rudolfine arts, provides rich evidence that the emperor’s court painters did not merely concentrate on images of imperial power or mannered erotic scenes. Those who preferred to paint naer het leven, or “close to life,” possibly anticipated more of the future than the masters of courtly allegory. Hans Hoffmann, Georg Hoefnagel, Roelandt Savery, and Pieter Stevens were painters of “nature and landscapes” in the understanding of their age. Hoffmann adored Dürer (particularly dear to Rudolf), and the emperor was fascinated by the precision and neatness of Hoefnagel’s flowers, insects, and traditional ornaments. Savery walked through Prague and Bohemia; Rudolf sent him off to the Tyrol in 1607 to bring back sketches of Alpine scenes; though some of them are peopled by peasants in distinctly Bohemian costumes remembered from earlier travels, these forest and mountain scenes show he was impressed by the ordered confusion of broken trees and new vegetative life, by dramatic rocks and magnificent mountain vistas, and they offer a first glimpse of the romantic sublime. Savery and his colleague Pieter Stevens sketched many corners of Rudolfine Prague too, decrepit homes and approaches to Charles’s great stone bridge. Savery was a sharp and untiring observer: when he attended religious services at the Old New Synagogue, he sketched a group of elderly men and explained, in marginal notes in Dutch, what clothes they wore and in what color.
Later surrealist poets and critics have always loved the idea that Giuseppe Arcimboldo most essentially represents the mystical world of Rudolf II, as if Joseph Arcimboldus Midiolanus, as he officially called himself, was not just one among many interesting court painters. Arcimboldo, born in 1527, worked first under the supervision of his father at Milan Cathedral doing minor ornamentation and stained-glass windows; he was attracted to Vienna by Ferdin
and I, Rudolf’s grandfather, and was appointed Hof-Conterfetter (court portraitist) by Maximilian II, to whom he devoted his famous allegories of the four elements and the four seasons, made up of their vegetative symbols. He was also active in Vienna and, occasionally, in Prague as a maître de plaisirs and fashion designer of inventive costumes for balls, banquets, masks, and tournaments. Arcimboldo was among the Italian group that Rudolf continued to employ; in 1582, Rudolf sent him to Germany to buy antiques and rare animals; but in 1587, when Rudolf consolidated his German and Dutch team in Prague, Arcimboldo asked for and received permission to return to his native Milan, whence he continued to send paintings and sketches to Rudolf, who made him count palatine two years before his death in 1593; Rudolf perhaps remembered that Emperor Charles IV had awarded a similar, largely symbolic, title to Petrarch. More recently, Oskar Kokoschka, Roland Barthes, and Salvador Dali have come to admire Arcimboldo, and his popular fame largely rests on his portrait of Rudolf as the ancient god Vertumnus, a witty montage of fruits, flowers, and vegetables of all seasons (the hair of millet, grapes, and sheaves of wheat; the nose a pear; his forehead a melon; and his beard consisting of nuts and chestnuts), done in the same ghiribizzate (curlicue), or rather wittily allegorical, style in which he had done his “Jurist” with law books in his stomach and his “Librarian,” entirely consisting of closed and open books, many years earlier. The surrealists’ glorification of Rudolf as Vertumnus must take into account that the painting, showing the royal magnificence by other means, was inspired by the Latin poet Propertius celebrating Vertumnus as a god of change and permanence, done in a manner that Arcimboldo developed long before he entered the service of the melancholy emperor, and was not even painted in Prague but in Milan, Arcimboldo’s true home.
Rudolf spared no expense to attract famous jewelers and stonecutters to his Prague court and to provide them with the gold, the silver, the diamonds, and other precious stones they needed for compositions they created solely to please his lonely sensibilities. It is an open question whether painters or goldsmiths were closer to his heart. Goldsmithing had flourished in Renaissance Augsburg, Nuremberg, Milan, and Florence, but Rudolf was not content to place his orders there; in the late 1580s, he invited to Prague several masters whom he chose with a supreme understanding of their craft, above all Anton Schweinberger Augsburg, Jan Vermeyen from Brussels, his disciple Andreas Osenbruck, and the Dutch Paulus van Vianen, who had had difficulties with the Inquisition when he was trained in Rome. The imperial and royal crown, created by Jan Vermeyen (never actually used by the emperor and now in Vienna) is the most perfect, most cryptic, and most valuable work of art ever made at the Rudolfine court. Each of its traditional components—coronet, miter, and arch—symbolized complex meanings of dominance, power, and magnificence, as did the eight big and the one hundred and eighty-six small diamonds (bought all over Europe by Rudolf’s special agents), the strings of pearls, the rubies, and the large and luminous sapphire on top, imported from far Kashmir. The art of cutting stones, or glyptics, had been traditionally cultivated in Milan; Rudolf succeeded in bringing from Milan to Prague Ottavio Miseroni and his brothers, and from Florence Cosimo Castrucci, who excelled in commessi in pietre dure, or the art of creating pictures from finely polished jasper, agate, and carnelian, a kind of stone intarsia. Italian and German tourists who now line up every day in Prague to buy crystal glass probably do not know that it was one Caspar Lehmann from Westphalia, a talented stonecutter, who in 1601 was appointed stonecutter of the royal chamber (Kammeredelsteinschneider) and in royal service shifted his attention from working with mountain crystals to high-quality glass, perfecting his personal technique to an incredible finesse that became fundamental to an entire Bohemian industry.
It cannot be said that the emperor did not support court architects who were kept busy building magnificent halls for his collections and stables for his Spanish stallions, but it would be difficult to show that he was as obsessively committed to their art as he was to painting, jewelry, and glyptics. For reasons of ceremony, he also continued to employ distinguished musicians and singers, among them two castrati, to perform at the cathedral and at Hradany at state banquets and dances. He was proud to be the patron of Philippe de Monte, a Neapolitan from Holland (Rudolf never permitted him to return home and he died in Prague), Jacques Renart, and Camillo Zanotti, noted and much admired composers of motets and villanelles (their music often printed in Prague).
The most remarkable cavalier involved in composing and performing at the court at that time was Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdražice, who came from the provincial Catholic gentry. He had been educated at the court of Archduke Ferdinand in the Tyrol, fought in the Turkish wars for four years, and later gone out with another Czech noble on a voyage to the Holy Land and the Near East. He described his experience in Jerusalem (where he wrote a motet, “They who trust the Lord”) and Egypt in a highly interesting report written in Czech in 1608, and he was welcomed home by the emperor, who bestowed on him the honorific title of chamberlain, or imperial valet. He was one of the few Czechs active in the arts at Rudolf’s court. His later life was of more political than artistic importance: he was one of the generals of the rebellious Estates who fought the Hapsburg regime (artillery being his specialty) after 1618 and was put to death in Prague when the victorious dynasty took its revenge in 1621.
Poets and writers have always done a good deal for Rudolf, telling entertaining stories about him, but he did not do much for them. He had little interest in contemporary poetry. He did not show any commitment to the remarkable German poetry written by Theobald von Höck (who was employed by a southern Bohemian baron), remained insensitive to the new strength and purity of the Czech literature emerging in the many activities of Daniel Adam of Veleslavín, who owned the famous Melantrich printing press, and showed no interest in the inspired philological work of the Brethren, who translated the Bible in a six-volume edition (1579-94) that remained the standard of language in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia for centuries to come.
The Rudolfine Prague elite—Czech, German, Italian, Silesian, and Dutch—swarmed with educated people writing in late humanist Latin, and even those who were made laureati (the nice title did not carry any emoluments) are largely forgotten today. Jakob Typotius (Dutch) was employed as court historiographer; Jan Campanus (Czech) taught at the university and converted to Catholicism in 1622; and Michael Maier, a court physician and student of the Rosicrucians, wrote a funny ornithological poem—each speaker, or rather bird, uses different meters or forms, the cuckoo staying phonetically close to his nest ( … sum cuculus cuculi cuculo …) while geese prefer clumsy hexameters. Visiting British writers, intellectuals, and diplomats, Catholic or Protestant, came and went. The English poet Edmund Campion, who, after a novitiate in Brno was ordained in Prague in 1578, taught for six years at the Jesuit school (he was later hanged and quartered in England), and Sir Philip Sidney came to Prague twice, once in 1575 on a grand tour and again in 1577 to offer to the new emperor Queen Elizabeth’s condolences upon the demise of his father, Maximilian; his report about Rudolf was not very friendly, saying that the new ruler was “extremely spaniolated.” Among the English in Rudolfine Prague, young Jane Elizabeth Weston, who wrote in Latin too, was encouraged by the imperial councillors rather than by Rudolf himself (she may have been fortunate, considering the rumors about his disorderly affairs); born in Sussex in 1582 she had left her native country together with her Catholic parents and came via France and Italy to northern Bohemia, where her father suddenly died and left the fate of his family in the hands of his Catholic friends. Miss Weston’s poems, printed in Frankfurt in 1602 and Prague in 1606, were praised by such European luminaries and influential critics as Heinsius and Scultetus. By 1598 she was settled in Prague, where she married John Leon of Eisenach, agent of the duke of Brunswick at the imperial court, gave birth to two daughters, and died at the early age of thirty. She was buried in the cloister of St. Thomas, in the Minor Town, where
thousands of foreign visitors, among them many English, now quaff the famous dark beer oblivious to historical reminiscences.
Scientists in Prague: Tadeáš Hájek, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Jessenius
Emperor Rudolf gathered distinguished people and preciosities of art and nature around himself to create a cordon sanitaire, or, rather, esthestique, to protect his sensibilities against the treacherous world. In the sciences at least, perhaps in alchemy as well, local scholars and faculty members of the Carolinum were important in linking the artifice of the court with the rapid and contradictory developments downtown. One Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek, called Hegecius in the scholarly parlance of the time, brought to the emperor’s attention what was going on in the Utraquist Carolinum (the emperor did not show much interest in the doings of its Catholic counterinstitution), was responsible for convincing him to bring to Prague the Danish mathematician Tycho Brahe, considered the most outstanding astronomer of the age, and personally intervened in the ever renewed quarrels between Tycho Brahe and his younger assistant, Johannes Kepler, who fully agreed on the importance of a systematic observation of the heavens but, unfortunately, on little else.