St Vitus Cathedral

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St Vitus Cathedral is the Gothic metropolitan cathedral of Prague, raised inside the walls of Prague Castle on the hill above the Vltava. It is the coronation church and burial place of the kings of Bohemia, the keeper of the Bohemian crown jewels, and the seat of the archbishop — the religious center of a kingdom and, for a stretch of the late Middle Ages and again around 1600, of an empire. Its full dedication names three saints: Vitus, Wenceslas, and Adalbert, the order in which sanctity gathered on the spot.

The ground beneath the Gothic

The hill had been holy for four centuries before a single Gothic stone was set. Around 925 Wenceslas, duke of Bohemia, raised a round church on the rock — a pre-Romanesque rotunda built to house a relic, a bone from the arm of St Vitus sent north by Henry the Fowler, the Saxon king. The dedication to a foreign martyr was a deliberate act of Christian statecraft, attaching the young Bohemian duchy to the saints of the Latin West. When Wenceslas was murdered by his brother’s men, the church he founded became the shrine of the very saint it helped to make: the duke was buried in his own rotunda, and the building turned into a reliquary for its builder. In 1039 the bones of Adalbert, the martyred second bishop of Prague, were carried home from the Baltic and laid here too. By 1060, under Spytihněv II, the rotunda had grown too small and was pulled down for a three-aisled Romanesque basilica with twin western towers. The Gothic cathedral that followed is the fourth church on a site that had never not been a church.

Two builders, one choir

The decisive year is 1344. In that year the bishopric of Prague was raised to an archbishopric, freeing the Bohemian church from the metropolitan at Mainz, and Charles IV — king of Bohemia, soon Holy Roman Emperor — laid the foundation of a cathedral worthy of a primatial see and an imperial capital. He summoned Matthias of Arras, a master trained in the radiating cathedral tradition of southern France, who set out the chevet on the French plan: a high choir ringed by an ambulatory and a wreath of chapels, drawn in the proportions of Reims and Narbonne. Matthias died in 1352 with only the lower walls of the east end standing.

What he left was finished by a different mind. In 1356 Charles brought in Peter Parler, a mason of about twenty-three from the Parler dynasty of Swabian builders, and Parler held the lodge for the next forty-three years, until his death in 1399. Where Matthias thought in the orthodox French vocabulary, Parler improvised. Over the choir he threw a vault of his own invention: instead of the single pair of diagonal ribs that span each bay of a classic High Gothic vault, he set two crossing pairs, so that the ribs run unbroken from bay to bay and weave a continuous reticulated mesh across the ceiling. These are the first true net-vaults on the Continent — a motif Parler seems to have caught from the restless geometry of English Decorated work and carried into stone with a structural daring that made the Prague choir one of the boldest pieces of architecture north of the Alps. He cut a flowing, flame-like tracery into the windows, hung the south portal — the Golden Gate — with a mosaic of the Last Judgment, and ringed the choir’s inner gallery, the triforium, with a sequence of portrait busts: the royal house, the archbishops, the two architects themselves, Parler’s own carved face among them. It is the earliest gallery of realistic portraiture in northern Europe, and a master builder placing his own likeness in the fabric was a claim about the dignity of his craft. The vault he invented became the grammar of Central European late Gothic for a hundred and fifty years.

The choir was conceived as more than a sanctuary. Charles IV, who ruled from Prague as Holy Roman Emperor and meant the city to be a second Rome, built the east end as a single instrument tuned to several uses at once: the high altar for the daily liturgy, the coronation place for the kings of Bohemia, the necropolis for the dynasty in the crypt beneath, and the reliquary stage for the saints whose bodies the hill already held. Parler’s chapels around the ambulatory were planned to receive royal and saintly tombs in a deliberate geography of memory, so that the act of worship, the making of a king, and the keeping of the dead were folded into one architectural idea. The cathedral was, in this sense, a coronation machine and a mausoleum before it was ever a finished building.

Parler’s manner did not stay on the hill. The lodge he ran became a school, and his sons and pupils carried the Prague style — the net-vault, the supple tracery, the realism in carved stone — east and south across the empire. The workshop’s reach is one strand in the wider story of late Gothic in the German lands, the architecture that would later raise the choir of St Stephen’s in Vienna and that reworked the long, broken building histories of Cologne and, on the other side of the Alps, Milan. Parler also took the emperor’s other great Prague commission, the stone bridge over the Vltava begun in 1357 whose memory his name keeps in its towers. The choir of St Vitus is the source-work of all of it.

The chapel at the center

At the building’s heart Parler built a single room that gathers everything the cathedral is for. The Chapel of St Wenceslas, consecrated in 1367, stands over the tomb of the murdered duke — a near-square chamber, deliberately set off from the soaring choir around it, low and dense and saturated with color. Its lower walls are faced with some thirteen hundred polished pieces of jasper, amethyst, and chrysoprase, each slab set into gilded plaster so that the stonework reads as a casket of gemstone laid over the dead. The medieval mind read the heavenly Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation in those mineral courses, its walls founded on precious stones; the chamber is a small architectural image of the city of the saints, built around the body of the man who first made the hill Christian. Above the stones run gilded paintings of the Passion and, later, of the Wenceslas legend.

A low door behind the altar opens onto a stair to the Crown Chamber, where the Bohemian regalia are kept. The room is sealed by a door with seven locks, whose seven keys are held apart by seven officers of the Czech state, so that the jewels cannot be reached except by the assembly of the realm’s highest hands. Behind it lies the Crown of St Wenceslas — gold set with sapphires, spinels, emeralds, and pearls, made for Charles IV around 1346 and dedicated to the patron saint, so that every later king of Bohemia was crowned not in his own crown but in the saint’s — together with the orb, the scepter, the coronation cross, and St Wenceslas’s sword. The regalia are shown to the public only on rare occasions, years apart. The chapel is the devotional knot of the building: saint, dynasty, and nation locked in one room.

The torso and the long pause

The cathedral was never finished in the Gothic age. When the Hussite wars broke over Bohemia from 1419, work stopped, the lodge dispersed, and the unfinished church passed through fire and confessional violence. What remained was a torso: a complete east end — choir, chapels, the Golden Gate, the lower storeys of the great south tower — closed off by a temporary wall, with the long nave a bare stub and the western front never begun. For four centuries the cathedral stood half-built, a finished sanctuary fronting an empty site.

The interval was not silent. Coronations and burials went on in Parler’s choir across the whole gap. A king of Bohemia was made in this church much as the German kings were made at Aachen: anointed and crowned at the high altar, but crowned in the Crown of St Wenceslas drawn from the chapel beside it, so that the living ruler took the diadem of the founding saint and held the kingdom as the saint’s deputy. The dead were gathered below. The kings of Bohemia were laid in the royal crypt beneath the floor — Charles IV and his four wives, Wenceslas IV, Ladislaus the Posthumous, George of Poděbrady, and others of the line, with Rudolf II added in the seventeenth century. In 1589 the Flemish sculptor Alexander Colin set a white marble mausoleum before the high altar, its effigies of Ferdinand I, Anna Jagiellon, and Maximilian II lying in Renaissance state inside the Gothic shell, the dynasty rendered in marble above the bones it covered. The great south tower was carried no higher in stone but was crowned in stages in the borrowed styles of the centuries that owned it: a Renaissance viewing gallery, then a Renaissance “helmet,” replaced in the eighteenth century by the bulbous Baroque cupola that still tops it above Parler’s medieval masonry. Into the tower in 1549 went Zikmund, the great bell cast by Tomáš Jaroš, the largest in the Bohemian lands, swung by hand on feast days.

Above the imperial city

The cathedral’s place in esoteric history is a matter of geography rather than doctrine. It sits within the castle precinct that Rudolf II made his capital in the decades around 1600, and the court he gathered below it drew alchemists, astronomers, and natural philosophers from across Europe — a milieu of John Dee and Edward Kelley at the scrying table, Tycho Brahe at the instruments, Johannes Kepler at the planetary tables, the Kunstkammer and the laboratories that fixed Rudolfine Prague in later imagination as the alchemical city. The emperor’s patronage, half empirical and half occult, made Prague a byword for the pursuit of the art, and the cathedral is the great fixed landmark above the streets where that reputation was earned. Rudolf himself was carried up into the royal crypt under its floor in 1612 — but only in death, and into a church that had kept its own work throughout. The alchemy ran in the palaces below the hill; the cathedral above ordered its days by the Mass and the offices, a seat of Latin Christianity rather than a laboratory of the art the emperor collected.

The cathedral finished

What four centuries had left undone, the nineteenth century resolved to complete. A Society for the Completion of St Vitus Cathedral formed around 1859, and the work passed through three architects: Josef Kranner, who restored the medieval fabric; Josef Mocker, commissioned in 1873, who designed and raised the nave and the twin-towered western front in a neo-Gothic worked to match Parler’s hand; and Kamil Hilbert, who took over in 1899 and brought the building to completion. The whole was consecrated on 28 September 1929, the thousandth anniversary of the martyrdom of St Wenceslas — so that a medieval cathedral opened its full length only in the age of the Czechoslovak republic, the demolished temporary wall releasing Parler’s choir into a nave six hundred years younger than itself. The newer half carries the hand of the Czech national revival: among its windows is the great north-aisle pane designed by Alfons Mucha and installed in 1931, sponsored by a Prague bank, showing the boy Wenceslas with his grandmother Ludmila amid the apostles of the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius — high Art Nouveau set into a Gothic frame. Prague Castle, the cathedral its crown, entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1992.

The fabric records the long argument between the medieval and the modern that runs through Czech history. Its Gothic east end is six hundred years old; its mosaics have been restored more than once; its great south tower carries a Renaissance gallery and a Baroque cap above Parler’s stone. The cathedral was begun for one idea of sacred kingship and finished under another idea of nationhood, and it holds both.

Reading the building

The scholarship on St Vitus centers on Parler’s choir and the workshop that formed around it. Paul Crossley’s chapters on Bohemian Gothic, and his joint work with Zoë Opačić, set the cathedral within the architecture of Charles IV’s imperial program; their essay “The Choirs of St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague: A Marriage of Liturgy, Coronation, Royal Necropolis and Piety” reads the east end as a single instrument designed at once for the Mass, the crowning of kings, and the burial of the dynasty. The meaning of the gemstone walls of the Wenceslas Chapel — their reading as the jeweled walls of the heavenly city and as the “blood in stone” of the martyr — is taken up in recent iconographic studies of the chapel and its kinship with Charles IV’s chapels at Karlštejn. On the man who built it, the standard account remains the entry for Petr Parler, which gathers the documented buildings — the cathedral choir, Charles Bridge, the lodge that carried his manner across Central Europe — apart from the later legend. The Mucha window of 1931 is documented through the holdings of the Mucha Foundation, which preserve the artist’s design and its commission. The Castle and its cathedral are inscribed as the dominant monument of the Historic Centre of Prague on the UNESCO World Heritage list, the documentary frame within which the building is now conserved.

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