Medieval Art in the Bohemian Lands Through the Lens of Catholic History

This paper deals with the history of the study and discipline called "History of Christian Art". It attempts to find the roots of the interest in history, sacred monuments, and national monuments of the past in the spiritual environment of the Czech lands, and its subsequent inclusion in the context of contemporary European developments of interest in art and its study. Beginning with the oldest hagiographic texts, which are not only records of literary history, but in many cases are important in terms of references to building monuments and artworks, among which Kristian's legend is dominant, through the texts of medieval chroniclers, Kosmas, his followers, the Chronicle of Zbraslav Monastery and chronicles from the reign of Charles IV., across the historiography of the Baroque period, which is without a doubt dominated by the work of Bohuslav Balbín and Thomas Pešina of Čechorod, and the period of national awakening, through a boom industry in the nineteenth century, when Ferdinand Josef Lehner made history with his founding work, to the culmination in the activities of representatives of the field the first half of the twentieth century, when it was represented by personalities such as Antonin Podlaha, Eduard Sittler, and Josef Cibulka. Based on the recapitulation and subsequent description of..