Leseprobe

413 No other painter who worked and won acclaim in Bohemia was more strongly influenced by the events that led to the Thirty Years’ War, and which continued to define Central Europe in the seventeenth century, than Karel Škréta.1 And no other artist was appropriated early on by art historians and styled the greatest Czech artist of (not only) the Baroque era to the same extent as he was.2 Having been born in about 16103 into a Protestant noble family in Prague, where he also died in 1674, Karel Škréta was forced to flee his homeland at a young age.His ten years spent travelling through various German states, to Switzerland, and above all to Italy, gave him a unique wealth of experience, which enabled him to attain an outstanding position after his return to Prague.The importance of his stay in Italy was manifested not least in the fact that he thereafter consistently used the Italianised name Carl(o) Screta. He acquired the reputation of a reviver of art in dif- ficult times immediately after his death, thanks to Joachim von Sandrart, with whom he was personally acquainted. In 1675, Škréta received an extensive tribute in the latter’s Teutsche Academie , where he was described as “a second Apelles on this Imperial Parnassus of the Muses”. According to Sandrart, Škréta, after his return to Prague, had found “the noble art of painting entrenched in a deep mire of utter con- tempt / and practically banished from the city”, and he had successfully endeavoured “to raise it up again through excel- lent works of art / and to wash the dirt off its face”.4 In 1889, Gustav Pazaurek described Škréta’s situation somewhat more prosaically in the first scholarly monograph on the art- ist: “Just as Plato once thanked the gods for three things every day, Screta too would have had reason to thank heaven for three things: that he was a deft painter, that he worked on this side of the Alps and thus he had less to fear from Italian competition, and also that he lived after the end of the Thirty Years’War.”5 Karel Škréta spent his childhood with six brothers and sisters in a wealthy household in Prague’s Old Town. The family belonged to the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren)6 and bore an aristocratic title, Šotnovský ze Závořic , which had been bestowed by Emperor Maximilian II on Karel’s grandfather—a furrier, wine merchant and miller who originated fromMoravia—in 1570. Accordingly, the marriage of Karel’s father Konrad to Katharina von Morchendorf, whose family were also among the recently ennobled Prague Protestant patriciate, was in keeping with his status. Konrad Škréta was an official of the Accounting Department of the Royal Bohemian Chamber ( Cammer-Buchhalterey ) and the owner of several properties in prime locations. His family’s Karel Škréta (1610–1674) MARIUS WINZELER FIG. 1 Tiberio Tinelli, Karel Škréta , Venice, c. 1636, oil on canvas, h. 70 cm, w. 53 cm, Prague, Národní galerie Praha, inv. no. O 3