Rudolfine Prague

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Between 1607 and 1611 the court painter Daniel Fröschl, administrator of the imperial collections, went room by room through Prague Castle and wrote down what the emperor owned. His inventory runs to 415 paper pages: chameleons, crocodiles, fish, a bird of paradise; images of unicorns, dragons, and mandrakes; bezoars in ornate mounts; Hans Schlottheim’s automata and Jost Bürgi’s rock-crystal clockwork. The Kunstkammer was neither gallery nor hoard but an instrument — a theatrum mundi in which creation entire could be held in adjoining rooms and read, scientific curiosity and magical conviction one method, answering the emperor’s pansophic certainty that every phenomenon belongs to one universal system. In his Gemmarum et lapidum historia (1609) the court physician and gem encyclopedist Anselm Boethius de Boodt explained why the emperor prized stones above his crowns: through them the collector comes to know “the ineffable might of Him who concentrates the beauty of the whole world into such small bodies.” To walk those rooms was to walk the universe in miniature.

Rudolf II, raised at the Spanish court of Philip II among the models of his future collection, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1576; by 1583 the imperial residence had completed its move from Vienna to Prague. For nearly three decades the imperial capital was a Bohemian city of joined towns — Old Town, New Town, the Lesser Town across the Vltava, the walled Jewish Town, and above them the castle hill of Hradčany, where St Vitus Cathedral stands inside the fortress walls. The court rebuilt the castle around the collections: the Rudolf Gallery of 1590–1598 for paintings, the Spanish Hall of 1602–1606 by the Italian architect Giovanni Maria Filippi for ceremony and sculpture. Rudolf’s motto was Fulget Caesaris Astrum — the star of Caesar shines — and Prague was the ground it shone on.

The star drew the learned traffic of Renaissance Europe. The door into the court for much of it was Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek (1526–1600), physician at the imperial court, astronomer, and reviewer, by imperial commission, of every calendar printed in Prague. Giordano Bruno passed through in 1588 and came away with three hundred taler of imperial money and no position at court.

The most famous arrivals lodged in Hájek’s own house. John Dee and Edward Kelley, who had left England in 1583 with the Polish lord Albrecht Łaski, reached the imperial court in 1584 carrying the angelic conversations begun at Mortlake — Dee at the table of practice, Kelley at the stone as scryer, the angels delivering through him a celestial language. Dee wrote to the emperor on 17 August 1584 and at his September audience presented the Monas Hieroglyphica, the hieroglyphic seal he had dedicated in 1564 to Rudolf’s father Maximilian II. Rome proved less patient than the emperor: pressed by the papal nuncio Filippo Sega, a Habsburg decree expelled the household from Prague in 1586, and Vilém of Rožmberk, the greatest magnate in Bohemia, installed them that September at Třeboň, where the conversations went on and where, in December 1586, Kelley’s red powder yielded the transmutation that made his name. The whole record of the Bohemian sessions passes through Kelley at the stone — one pair of eyes scholarship has never seen around — and the system the angels delivered belongs to Enochian magic. The partnership broke in 1589 and Dee turned home. Kelley stayed and rose — a knighthood from Rudolf, property, standing at court — then fell, imprisoned by the emperor whose gold he could not multiply on demand, and died, probably late in 1597, of injuries from an attempted escape.

Prague keeps a street for such men that none of them ever inhabited. Golden Lane, the row of small houses against the northern fortification, went in 1597 to the castle marksmen; goldsmiths worked there too, and the castle’s official history is blunt that alchemists never lived in the lane. The alchemy of Rudolfine Prague needed no fairy-tale alley; it lived openly at court, among named, salaried, examined, and titled men. Michael Maier entered the emperor’s service as physician on 19 September 1609 and ten days later was raised to hereditary nobility as Comes Palatinus; he left in April 1611 as his patron’s authority collapsed, carrying the court’s hermetic program into the Rosicrucian decade and the emblem books that followed. Michael Sendivogius, his contemporary at Prague, published the Novum Lumen Chymicum (1604), the most influential alchemical text of its generation. Boodt catalogued the mineral kingdom from inside the Kunstkammer; the Rožmberk court in southern Bohemia ran a parallel patronage. The legend put the art in a hidden lane; the documents put it on the payroll.

The same payroll carried the heavens. On Hájek’s initiative Rudolf invited Tycho Brahe, and the greatest observational astronomer of the age arrived in the summer of 1599, observing first from Benátky nad Jizerou, then from autumn 1600 from the terrace of the royal summer palace. Tycho, a Paracelsian in his medicine as in his chemistry, suited the court’s temper exactly. Johannes Kepler joined him in 1600; when Tycho died suddenly on 24 October 1601 — his tomb is in the Týn Church on Old Town Square — the emperor promoted Kepler imperial mathematician and charged him with the great planetary tables. In twelve Prague years Kepler fixed the elliptical orbit of Mars by 1605, completed the Astronomia nova published in 1609 with the first two laws of planetary motion, and observed the new star of 1604. “Prague is convenient for my studies,” he wrote in 1600, “because of the lively intercourse between nations.” The Tabulae Rudolphinae appeared at Ulm in 1627, fifteen years after the emperor’s death and dedicated of necessity to Ferdinand II — but the name on the foundational star-tables of modern astronomy is Rudolf’s, the court’s permanent claim on the sky.

Below the castle hill, the Jewish Town lived its own golden age under the same star. Mordecai Maisel (1528–1601), primas of the community and financier to the emperor, held privileges unmatched in the Empire, among them the right to build a synagogue of his own, consecrated in 1592; at his death the crown seized his fortune despite an imperial privilege to bequeath it. In February 1592 Rudolf received Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, in audience. His disciple David Gans — the chronicler and astronomer who would himself stand among Tycho’s instruments at Benátky — set the meeting down in his Tsemah David, printed in Prague that year: the emperor “received him with a welcome and merry expression, and spoke to him face to face, as one would to a friend.” What passed between them was kept secret; the community understood it to have touched hidden, kabbalistic matters. Out of that closed room Prague made, in time, its most famous story: the Maharal shaping a man of river clay, quickening it to guard his people, and at last laying it to rest in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, where the dust keeps it still. The story is Prague’s own telling of its Rudolfine golden age, and its date can be fixed: no Hebrew work of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century — not Gans’s chronicle, not the Maharal’s epitaph — joins Judah Loew to a golem. The legend gathered around him in the 1830s and 1840s, in the circle of the Prague publisher Wolf Pascheles, whose Galerie der Sippurim (1847) gave it print.

The court’s last years darkened in the family quarrel. From 1606 the archdukes declared Rudolf’s brother Matthias head of the house; in June 1608 Rudolf was forced to cede Hungary, Austria, and Moravia, keeping Bohemia and the imperial title. The price of keeping Bohemia became the era’s most consequential document: the Letter of Majesty of 9 July 1609, in which Rudolf as king confirmed to the Bohemian estates the free practice of their confessions — the most important act of religious toleration in the Empire since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. It did not save its author. After the Passau troops’ disastrous incursion of 1611, Matthias entered Prague, took the Bohemian crown, and left his brother an emperor without a country, a prisoner among his own collections. Rudolf died in Prague Castle on 20 January 1612, and the court went back to Vienna.

The collections stayed, and the city’s catastrophes found them. Inventories of 1619 and 1621 — the latter counting 1,428 items — tracked the Kunstkammer through the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 and the White Mountain defeat of 8 November 1620. Then, early on a July morning in 1648, in the closing weeks of the Thirty Years’ War, a hundred Swedish soldiers under Hans Christoph von Königsmarck scaled the walls and took the castle bank of Prague by surprise; three thousand more followed, and the looting ran for two days on a detailed plan. The tally of the plunder reads like Fröschl’s inventory in a distorting mirror: 470 paintings, 69 bronze figures, 179 ivories, 600 vessels of agate and crystal, 403 “Indian” curiosa, more than 300 mathematical instruments, uncut diamonds. The Codex Gigas — presumed to stand behind item 661 of the 1621 inventory, “a very large book on parchment” — reached Stockholm with the war booty in 1649 beside the Codex Argenteus; Queen Christina took the choicest books to Rome at her abdication and left the giant behind.

The rehabilitation of the mad emperor

For three centuries after his death Rudolf figured as the melancholic who let an empire slip while he stared into jasper. The scholarship that undid the caricature begins with R. J. W. Evans, whose Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (1973) read patronage, collecting, and occult interests as one coherent intellectual world; its chapter on the occult arts remains the standard frame for Prague as esoteric capital. The Kunstkammer recovered its order when Fröschl’s lost inventory, rediscovered after the Second World War in the Liechtenstein library at Vaduz, was edited by Rotraud Bauer and Herbert Haupt as “Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser Rudolfs II., 1607–1611” in the Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 72 (1976). On its evidence Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, in “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II” (Art Journal 38, 1978), retired the picture of a depressive’s hoard in favor of an ordered representation of world and majesty. Deborah E. Harkness’s John Dee’s Conversations with Angels (Cambridge, 1999) restored the Bohemian mission to the center of Dee’s natural philosophy. The court’s laboratories received their archival history in Ivo Purš and Vladimír Karpenko’s Alchemy and Rudolf II (Artefactum, 2016), which separates the salaried, documented practice from the Golden Lane legend. And Hillel J. Kieval’s “Pursuing the Golem of Prague” (Modern Judaism 17, 1997) dated the telling itself, showing that the golem reached the Maharal only in the nineteenth century.

One object closes the era’s account. Number 351 in Königsmarck’s transport list is entered as “a face of fruit”: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus (c. 1590–91), the Roman god of the turning seasons composed of the fruits and flowers of every season at once — the painter’s gift to his emperor, allegory of a golden age in which all seasons bear under one reign. The painting passed to Per Brahe the younger and hangs today at Skokloster Castle in Sweden, far from the rooms Fröschl counted: the emperor still wearing all his seasons, in the country that carried his universe away.

→ Related: St Vitus Cathedral · Occult Paris · Johannes Kepler · Giordano Bruno · Enochian Magic · Alchemy