Crossbreeding cultures : Italian and local, elite and popular; building in Bohemia, 1490-1720

From the moment that Central-European culture at the end of the nineteenth century developed art history into an independent academic discipline, the early modern building yards in the rolling landscapes between the Danube and the Moldau were regarded primarily as local tributaries of an Italian, or eventually German, production, acquiring additional impurities the further away they were from the source of artistic genius. With Prague and Bohemia as an operating base and covering the late fifteenth through early eighteenth centuries, this chapter will nuance this vision of “a passive recipient to which influence flows” (DaCosta Kaufmann): Prague society, with a population of artists so heterogeneous that the model of an autochthonous recipient is unsustainable, is a choice subject for the study of the sophisticated nature and techniques of artistic métissage. By confronting the ambitions of clients with the particular backgrounds of their architects, we will show how a new architecture emerged and how design choices and extraordinary forms developed in an area of religious fault lines and ethnical stratifications. The reader will discover the way in which foreign models are paired with local custom, but also, how traditional forms, regarded as native, often spring from foreign sources. The origins and particularities of some late-Baroque churches, for instance, reside in the intricate combination of ardent Formwillen and theological erudition, of Italianist Baroque culture and local devotional practices. Their geometric complexities and apparent linguistic contradictions are the fruit of harsh ideological clashes and of the surprising ecclesiastical wit and the convoluted – why not Baroque? – minds of the abbots who, contemporaneously, often operate as real international entrepreneurs. The resulting semantic riches – which modernism so often seemed to lack, as Robert Venturi argued – have been tailored to the needs of a complex society and clientele: modern in many ways, but still firmly rooted in pre-modern practices and traditions; a world, for sure, on the brink of crumbling in front of impending Enlightenment triumph