Leseprobe

Places & Regions 170 town ( Jesuits in the Clementinum) or they could build their religious house on a ’green field’ site (Capuchins in Hradčany, Ursulines in the New Town). Their settlement resulted in the propagation of Catholic forms of piety, such as venerat- ing miraculous paintings and sculptures (the Infant Jesus of Prague, donated in 1628), holding processions, conducting pilgrimages, introducing cults of hitherto unestablished saints, organising the activity of religious fraternities, and creating new holy sites such as the Loreto sanctuaries (Hájek u Prahy / Waldl and Mikulov / Nikolsburg—both in 1623, Prague in 1625—an aristocratic foundation whose care was entrusted to the Capuchins).16 In general, this radical change in the urban and ecclesiastical topography can be described as a shift from Catholic bridgeheads to large-scale appropri- ation, with the aim of transforming both urban and rural areas on a confessional basis. This included not only the takeover (or, in a few selected cases, the demonstrative destruction) of non-Catholic churches and the growing number of complexes run by religious orders, as well as the restoration of parish administration, which was now in the hands of the Catholic clergy; it also entailed the transforma- tion of the territory into a sacred landscape, in which towns were linked to regional pilgrimage sites, and local pilgrim- ages—and the religious festivals associated with them—were revived.17 Changes in patronage pattern In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the char- acter of artistic patronage, which had some specific features in Bohemia, also underwent a fundamental change18. Prague was now no longer an imperial residence, which led to a decline in monarchical patronage, but already in the 1620s, the Emperor initiated reconstruction work at Prague Castle and donated works of art. Particularly noteworthy in this connection are symbolic acts such as investment in the dec- oration of St Vitus’s Cathedral (e.g. the mural painting of Ferdinand II and his Family, the Crucif ixion, the Virgin Mary and the Bohemian Patron Saints by Matthias Mayer, or the donation of the St Luke altarpiece by Jan Gossaert with its central panel of St Luke Painting the Madonna ). The inside of St Vitus’s Cathedral was in need of renovation, as the older interior decoration had been largely destroyed in the iconoclastic cleaning during the reign of Friedrich of the Palatinate in 1619 (fig. 3). After the Battle of White Moun- tain, this event provided the victorious party with an excel- lent opportunity to present the defeat of the rebels not only as divine punishment for the desecration of the cathedral, but also as proof of the legitimacy of using images in wor- ship. Ferdinand II also pointedly encouraged the founding of new monasteries in the city (e.g. the Discalced Carmelites in the Lesser Town and the Servites on White Mountain) FIG. 3 Caspar Bechteler, The Iconoclasts in St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague 1619 , Prague, before 1623, oak panel relief, h. 148 cm, w. 480 cm, Prague, Metropolitan Chapter of St Vitus, inv. no. V315