St. Wenceslas, Christian prince and martyr
Between 1641 and 1643, Karel Škréta and his collaborators painted a total of thirty-two large-format canvases depicting scenes from the legend of St. Wenceslas and his posthumous glory. The set, created for the ambit of the Barefoot Augustinian Monastery in Prague at Zderaz, was sold off after the dissolution of the convent during the Josephine reforms and only eight paintings have survived to this day, one of which did not come from Škrét’s workshop. Three paintings are in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague, one in the Museum of Art in Olomouc and the rest have fallen into the hands of private owners. The recently completed restoration of the painting, “St. Wenceslas is having pagan idols cut down and Christian churches built”, on display in the permanent exhibition of the Archdiocesan Museum, and another canvas, “St. Wenceslas is hoeing a vineyard, pressing the mass wine and baking the hosts”, now in private ownership, became a welcome opportunity to exhibit both works together. The small exhibition in the Picture Gallery of the Archdiocesan Museum is complemented by documentation of the restoration work on both paintings, carried out in 2021 and 2024 by ac. mal. Wenceslao Bohemorum duci ac martyri inclyto sertum […] from 1643-1644, borrowed from the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague.
The monastery of the Augustinian barefoot monks at Zderaz was not only the centre of the St.Wenceslas cult in the Baroque period, but also a place of development of Czech history-writing thanks to its rich library. In the monastery was kept an image, revered as vera effigies, i.e. the true form of St. Wenceslas (today in the Museum of the Capital City of Prague), and the manuscript of the 14th century legend of St. Wenceslas Ut annuncietur. Together with the chronicles of Jan Dubravius (Historia Regni Bohemiae) and Václav Hájek of Libočany (Chronicle of Bohemia), it became the main source of inspiration for the educated prior of the monastery, P. Aegidius à s. Joanne Baptiste, the author of the ideological concept of the paintings and the exhibited celebratory writings. His illustrations, made by the order’s engraver, Frater Henricus, are based on the compositions of Škrét’s paintings and thus give at least a partial idea of the form of the unpreserved paintings.
The individual canvases were funded by various donors. The painting St. Wenceslas Gives the Cutting Down of Pagan Idols and the Building of Christian Churches, which is the seventh in the series, can probably be associated with Dr. Isaiah Hanno. The tenth painting – St. Wenceslas hoeing a vineyard, pressing the mass wine and baking the hosts – was commissioned and paid for by the then mayor of Prague’s Old Town, Václav Vořikovský of Kunratice. He even had his own vineyard painted for the picture, along with the vineyard chapel of St. Mary Magdalene (built in 1635), behind which one can recognize the silhouette of St. Vitus Cathedral or the tower of Strahov Monastery. The chapel is still standing today, but in 1956 it was the first historical building in Bohemia to be moved from its original location about 31 metres downstream, upstream of the Vltava River.
Although the cycle was created with a greater or lesser participation of Škrét’s workshop collaborators, it belongs to the important monuments of Czech Baroque painting, characterised by a strong emphasis on provincial patriotism. Individual scenes also influenced the subsequent development of St Wenceslas’ iconography, in which the saint is depicted not only as a model of a Christian ruler, wise and kind, but also as a fighter against the infidels.
- Exhibition: St. Wenceslas, Christian Prince and Martyr. Two restored paintings from the St. Wenceslas cycle from the monastery of the Barefoot Augustinians in Prague at Zderaz
- Conception: Helena Zápalková
- Restoration work: Šárka Bergerová and Petr Berger
- Collaboration: Ondřej Žák, Bradna Restoration, Ltd.
- Graphic design: Petr Šmalec
- Instalation: Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář, Ondřej Žák
- Loaners: the Royal Canon of the Premonstratensians at Strahov, private collection
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)