Prague Museum Reviews: Part I

I can highly recommend spending Thanksgiving in Prague. Thanks perhaps (agh) to global warming, it wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d thought it would be, and rain wasn’t a problem. A cashmere sweater, wool coat, warm scarf and gloves did the trick. There are more people there than you’d expect in an “off time” and especially on the weekend, but I can’t even imagine the crush of people that would be there in the summer months all cramming onto the Charles Bridge. The only real negative, and it wasn’t a big deal as long as you plan, are the reduced hours at certain museums that go into effect in November. Oh--and this can be a plus or a minus, depending on how economical you're feeling: The souveniers are, to be blunt but accurate, overpriced crap. Truly. While the notion of one of those Russian nesting dolls housing various Simpsons-Bart, Lisa, etc., or a set of George Bush or Berlusconi nesting dolls is amusing, it's not something you're (or I'm, at least) going to fork over too many Czech crowns for.

My frustrated consumerism aside, it’s a beautiful city to wander around—you’re always finding cool little (or big) architectural elements to admire, like this door, this synagogue, which I haven't yet been able to identify (it's not in the Jewish quarter--it's closer to the State Opera), and the Hogwartsesque twin spires of the Tyn Church.









One new high-profile architectural element I did not particularly admire: Frank Gehry’s so-called “Fred and Ginger” building that is often described as "dancing along the banks of the Vltava river." Nothing was knocked down in order to make room for it; the lot stood empty for 35-40 years after the original building was hit by one of the few light air raids in the war. It’s very mod, and, in my opinion, doesn’t fit and doesn’t add anything by not fitting. You know how sometimes buildings that don’t fit can make a really great statement and you just admire them for what they are, and they make you think? The Gehry building didn’t do that for me. Here’s a picture of it and you can make your own judgment--I actually didn't view it from this vantage point--it's the building bulging out in the middle--and this actually looks better than I thought, from a distance, at least.











The museums? A mixed bag, from what I saw and I couldn’t possibly see them all in six days, because, much as I’d like to see everything, this is after all vacation, so involves taking time to really enjoy the things you’re seeing. Some of the collections, like the one at Convent of St. Agnes, which houses the National Gallery’s Museum of Medieval Art, are very well displayed, with informative writeups for every picture. I’ll start with a description of that, and in following posts, move on to impressions/info on the National Gallery pictures at the Trade Fair Palace (Veletrzni Palac), the National Museum (that’ll be brief; for me, the big thrill, so to speak, was taking pictures of Woolly Mammoths to send to my nephew. This is what happens when your last name is Woolley, although, thankfully, none of us are mammoths), the Mucha Museum, and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, particularly the Spanish Synagogue, which is in a (yes, you could guess this) Moorish style and is just gorgeous, and has a good, heart-wrenching museum on its second floor/gallery.

Convent of St. Agnes: Housed in what "The Rough Guide to Prague" tells me is the city's oldest surviving Gothic building, founded in 1233, are some truly great Madonna/Madonna and child sculptures. An in-depth art guide I took along, “Art for Travellers/Prague,” by Deanne MacDonald, notes that “In the 12th and 13th centuries a popular cult of the Virgin developed partially in response to the church’s traditional hostility toward women, an attitude exemplified by the vilification of the figure of Eve.” Here’s a picture of a statue that caught my eye—if I could find what I wrote about it in my notes and tell you more about it, that would be great, but…I can’t find them yet. When looking at the blue in some of the panel paintings of Madonnas, I’d think back to that great Victoria Finlay book mentioned in an earlier post on this site and the use of the very precious royal blue lapis lazuli stone that was ground up and used as paint and or a dye.

After the Madonna statues, in the main part of the gallery, the pictures were displayed on gunmetal gray metal sheets bolted onto the wooden floor—this is in an old stone and brick convent that’s in the Gothic style, so high vaulted ceilings—and somehow this very contemporary treatment really works. It allows the Convent to show many more paintings in the space than they could with thicker regular walls, too, I imagine, and keeps the feeling of the room light. There are all sorts of gorgeous rich paintings of saints and such and you can play your own little private parlor game of picking out symbolic details (goldfinch=”ancient motif that was a pagan symbol of the soul later adopted by Christianity. A legend grew that the goldfinch acquired its red spot when it flew down to remove a thorn from Christ’s crown on the way to Calvary, and so it was seen as symbolizing Christ’s role as savior and martyr and became a popular attribute in Italian art” (thank you, Deanne MacDonald), a window frame ”symbolizing [in the painting of the Madonna of Most] that through devotion to the Virgin, the faithful would see into the Kingdom of Heaven,” etc., etc.)

My only wish there was that the writeups had occasionally gone into the materials and techniques used in the paintings; there was some heavy sort of patterning in gold paint that occasionally went all over the background of the painting and over onto the frame and I would have liked to learn more about that.