This paper today is part of a panel exploring the nature of sacred space in the early modern world.  The broader project on which I am working investigates the creation of “sacred space” in the Bohemian kingdom after the Catholic victory of White Mountain in 1620.  From the time of Hus in the early fifteenth century, the Czech lands had developed a reputation as the homeland of heresy.  A proverb that widely circulated in the sixteenth century may have captured popular sentiment best as it proudly proclaimed that Germany was admirably self-sufficient.  Swabia provided her prostitutes, Franconia her thieves, Frisia her perjurers, Saxony her drunkards, and Bohemia her heretics.   After the Habsburgs had turned the schismatic tide in 1620 they launched an aggressive campaign of recatholicization.  My project in its most general terms considers how a Catholic identity was constructed in Bohemia in the century following White Mountain, how Catholic elites sought to “sanctify space” in a region that had been defiled by heresy for over two centuries.  My specific focus today is on the issue of religious art.  There are few regions north of the Alps that can match the rich landscape of the Bohemian baroque.  Leading an artistic and architectural makeover of unprecedented proportions, a host of painters, sculptors and craftsmen transformed the Czech kingdom in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  Marian columns, wayside chapels, pilgrimage complexes along with new or restored churches, convents and monasteries sprung up across the region.   These monuments, the most visible signs of Bohemia’s new confessional identity, have been the subject of considerable study.   In much of this literature, however, there has been a tendency to discuss aesthetic developments in isolation from the historical circumstances in which they are grounded.  Though scholars of the Bohemian baroque would certainly acknowledge that the artistic activity of their period was a product of the new religious climate, they have often failed to integrate their work into a broader historical narrative.
 This afternoon I can only offer one possible approach to this general problem of understanding Bohemia’s religious art in the post-White Mountain period.  As my title suggests, I believe that more attention needs to be paid to the connection between image-breaking and image-making in the Czech lands.  Though Jan Hus had once commented, “It is as great a shame to destroy a valuable picture as a valuable book,” the revolution that proceeded his death developed in an entirely different fashion.   It is difficult to underestimate the destruction that accompanied the Hussite wars.  They unleashed an iconoclastic frenzy that could not be matched even by the zeal of the Reformation’s most ardent image breakers.    There were few churches or monasteries that were left untouched by the great unrest.   It is important, however, to note that this first wave of iconoclasm was essentially over by the time Emperor Sigismund reached an agreement with the Hussites at Jihlava in 1436.  The Hussite legacy would never completely disappear.   It lived on in splinter groups that drew their inspiration from the more radical Hussite wing.  Occassionally there would be an incident such as the one in 1504 when a Prague tailor pulled down a statue of Christ and began whipping it with his colleague.    But in general Bohemia’s religious culture from the middle decades of the fifteenth century forward was relatively conservative in nature.  Images, processions and even a moderate Marian cult, what Eamon Duffy has described in the English context as traditional religion, remained important elements of Czech ecclesiastical culture after the initial dislocations of the Hussite revolution had passed.   It was only when more extreme ideas of the Protestant Reformation reached Prague in the second decade of the seventeenth century that iconoclasm once more became a significant issue.
The relationship of the Reformation to the visual arts is of course a complicated matter.   Lutherans were generally conservative while Calvinists often assumed a more aggressive stance.  In the Institutes Calvin concluded that religious images were contrary to Scripture.  He did not, however, advocate iconoclasm.  According to Calvin it was the role of the magistrate to remove such objects from former Catholic churches in an orderly fashion.  The problem arose when local authorities were resistant to these views.  In regions such as France and the Low Countries Calvinist adherents found no support from secular rulers and thus took it upon themselves to execute this commission.  As a result, there would be waves of violence when mobs ransacked churches and destroyed sacred art.  The situation in Bohemia, however, was very different.  With the election of Frederick of the Palatinate, the so-called Winter King, the Czech estates installed a regime that vigorously promoted an iconoclastic agenda.  The éminence grise behind this program was the king’s court preacher and advisor, Abraham Scultetus.   Initially educated at Wittenberg, Scultetus was part of the university’s crypto-Calvinist faction.  He eventually found a more congenial home at Heidelberg.  Scultetus would accompany his patron to his new kingdom where a significant challenge lay before him.
Changes began in Prague on October 15, 1619 when St. Vitus cathedral was officially handed over to Frederick’s entourage with plans to transform it into the new king’s court church.  The dean and the canons were promptly evicted and given three days to quit the premises while the cathedral itself was sealed and guarded by Frederick’s men.  Though the Palatine elector would be crowned in the church a few weeks later, more substantial alterations would need to be executed before St. Vitus was suitable for Calvinist worship.  In the days surrounding the Christmas holiday Scultetus launched a thorough “cleaning” of the cathedral.  To appreciate the bold and aggressive steps taken by Scultetus it is necessary to put these events of late December in a broader context.  Those princes implementing a “second Reformation” in Lutheran territories during this period frequently met significant resistance from the populace when they attempted to remove religious images from the churches.  In Berlin the decorating changes in the cathedral precipitated a riot in 1615 where Prince Johann Georg of Brandenburg-Jägerndorf was physically attacked.   Scultetus, in contrast, was not inclined to work furtively nor afraid of popular opposition.  One of the German workers engaged to take down the images reported that Scultetus turned to the crew during their work and loudly exclaimed, “O you Lutherans, come to me and I will open your eyes, for you most assuredly stink of Rome.”   At the center of this protracted operation at the cathedral was a celebrated sermon Scultetus delivered on 22 December.
Structuring his homily around Exodus 20:4-6, Scultetus made three simple and direct points.  God clearly forbids the portrayal of his likeness.  Moreover, he does not permit the worship of images.   It is thus incumbent upon the prince to ensure that proper worship is restored by removing all items that would be offensive to God.  Scultetus’s subsequent remarks, however, indicate how sweeping his vision for this action actually was.  In the Low Countries in those instances where the magistrates did support Calvinist reforms, religious art was often disassembled orderly or returned to their original donors, and as we have noted earlier, Calvin himself did not support iconoclastic activity.  Frederick’s court preacher was of another mind altogether.  He would cite a series of examples from the Old Testament where the Israelites threw down and completely destroyed the idols and altars of the Philistines.   In his autobiography he would elaborate further on this theme.  In recalling these events, he turned once more to Scripture.  God has called us to remove all idols from our heart, and as a sign of this inner conversion, outward action is necessary.   The Lord enjoins all true believers to “take pictures away; that is, to break them or consign them to the flames.”
This is exactly what occurred during the last two weeks of December.  Scultetus’s offensive actually began the day before he preached his sermon exhorting the faithful to action.  An eyewitness to the events, Simon Kapihorsky, reports that on the 21st Frederick began his “war against the altars, the images, and the tombs of the saints”.   The Winter King’s followers started their work by taking down the large crucifix opposite the high altar before moving on to the tomb of John Nepomuk, which they quickly dismantled.  Finally, they proceeded to the high altar itself.   Apart from the images and the statues they also gathered together the chairs of the archbishop and canons and then burned them all in a heap.  The iconoclasts continued their campaign two days after Christmas.  Among the casualties that day was an altar painting of Lucas Cranach that had been commissioned by Ferdinand I.
 Unlike more typical incidents of Reformation iconoclasm in France, Switzerland and the Low Countries, the “cleaning” of St. Vitus Cathedral was not a movement with broadbase support.  Even some of the men who had been hired to do the work had serious qualms about the business.  A certain Jakob Hübel reported that when he complained that many of the valuable objects were being mistreated, one of Frederick’s advisors responded with a laugh, “We would like to do this to Rome as well.”   The Catholics, of course, were the most vociferous in their opposition to Scultetus’s program.  The cathedral was the only parish church in Prague that had remained faithful to Rome, and its dean and canons saw it as one of the last Catholic redoubts in the city.  The canons of the chapter wrote an impassioned letter of lament to Archbishop Lohelius who was in exile in Vienna.   They described the destruction of the cathedral furnishings and saw this as a token of the end of Catholicism altogether in Bohemia.   The resistance to Frederick’s policies, however, extended far beyond the small Catholic community.  The Utraquists, too, were concerned with his ecclesiastical innovations.  Cooperating with the Catholics, they were able to preserve the St. Wenceslas chapel, far and away the cathedral’s most important shrine.
After the St. Vitus incident Frederick turned his attention to another of Prague’s famous landmarks.  A cross had stood on the third pier of the Charles Bridge since 1361.  Though it was pulled down during the early years of the Hussite wars, it had been re-erected in the middle of the fifteenth century and joined by two flanking statues.  When Frederick arrived, it was his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, who seems to have been most offended by what she referred to as the bridge’s “naked bath attendant”.  Shortly after Christmas 1619, Frederick conferred with his council concerning the fate of this object.  In no uncertain terms, they warned the king against removing the cross as they feared a great public outcry were it to disappear.  Though no official steps were taken, some time later it mysteriously disappeared at night.   As we see both at St. Vitus and with the cross, Frederick and his Calvinist entourage were clearly operating on a very different level than that of his subjects.  For the Palatine prince his actions were based on well defined theological principles.  Religious objects, however, can possess a multiplicity of meanings, and what was merely a doctrinal issue for the Calvinist court was perceived as an attack on traditional Bohemian culture by the general populace.
The backlash against Frederick and Scultetus was substantial.  The St. Vitus incident became a cause célèbre initiating a significant flurry of pamphlets.  Both Catholic and Lutheran theologians jumped into the fray as strong denunciations of the action were quickly issued from Ingolstadt, Mainz, Tübingen, Wittenberg and Leipzig.   One of the most interesting of the publications was an illustrated broadsheet that depicted Frederick flying high above Prague and accompanied by the devil who has led the prince through a series of three temptations.  As indicated by the crucifix prominently displayed on Charles Bridge, one of these trials concerned the treatment of Prague’s sacred images and statues.  Failing to detect the devil’s clever stratagem, Frederick fully embraced Scultetus’s iconoclastic program.  This decision, as the commentator informs us, contributed to the Winter King’s final downfall.  Pamphlets were also produced in Prague that attacked the policies of the Calvinist court.  One fascinating tract recounts a dialogue between an Utraquist, Catholic and Lutheran.  Distressed by Scultetus’s zeal, the Utraquist remarked to his Lutheran colleague, “It would be better for you and me to follow the Jesuits than the Calvinists, for they have never thrown such a big rock in our garden as the Calvinists have just done.”  At his turn the Lutheran passed on the rumor that a thousand English iconoclasts were even now preparing to descend on Bohemia and finish the business that Scultetus had begun.   In the end, all three individuals banded together and condemned the religious innovations that threatened the kingdom’s spiritual and cultural heritage.
 The issue of images also became a critical feature in the campaign to win the kingdom back for the Habsburgs.  On October 11, 1620 Bavarian troops entered the southern Bohemian town of Strakonice.  Mansfeld’s forces, loyal to the Czech estates, had recently evacuated the village.  Domingo Ruzola, a Spanish Carmelite, who accompanied the Bavarians and served as spiritual advisor to the Duke, picked through the ruins of a building that had recently belonged to the Knights of Malta.  In it he found the usually tokens of an army in quick retreat.  Furniture was demolished, windows were smashed, and in this case images of the saints lay broken and scattered throughout the residence.  Ruzola realized that much of this disorder was merely the byproduct of an army in quick retreat, but the friar found one item in particular that indicated not all of the destruction was random.   In one corner he came across a painting that had been ritually mutilated.  On this canvas depicting the adoration of the shepherds, someone had sliced out the eyes of all those in the scene save for the baby in the manger.  Ruzola’s later biographer would recount the friar’s reaction to his discovery in mystical terms:
Suddenly our father felt a pain so real it seemed as if he had been struck with a lance.  To have seen with what impiety the Holy Mother of God and all the other saints had been treated filled him with disgust…At that moment he made a most noble vow to honor with all his energies the image of the Holy Mother which had received such injuries at the hands of the perfidious heretics.

After this experience Ruzola would place images at the center of the struggle with the Winter King.  Catholic illustrations of White Mountain would feature the friar standing before the Duke of Bavaria and his troops painting in hand exhorting them to beat back the heretic and reclaim Bohemia for Rome.   The soldiers who went into battle against Frederick’s mercenaries carried images with them.  Crucifixes, medals and small devotional pictures accompanied them into the fray.  From the Catholic perspective it would not be an exaggeration to describe the campaign against Frederick as a new crusade.  The outbreaks of iconoclasm at St. Vitus, Strakonice and elsewhere surely recalled a longer history of image breaking in Bohemia and the earlier unsuccessful crusades against the Hussites.  Now once more, the emperor and his allies had assembled an army to fight an old foe who had reappeared in new form.  Even Ruzola, the spiritual leader of this new military expedition, consciously styled himself after an old enemy of the Hussites, John of Capistrano.  While in one hand he carried the image of Strakonice, in the other, like his predecessor, he held a large crucifix which he would bring with him into battle.
 If images figured prominently in the war against Frederick, the victory of White Mountain was in large part celebrated as their triumph.  The painting of Strakonice came to be seen as a relic of tremendous importance for all of Catholic Europe.  As such, there was significant demand to install it in Rome itself.  On 8 May 1622 it was placed on an elaborately decorated throne together with the imperial crown of Ferdinand II in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.  Its final destination, though, was a smaller church constructed only a few years earlier, Santa Maria della Vittoria.  There it headed in a festive procession that commemorated the victory of White Mountain a year and a half earlier.  The image would become the iconographic focus of the church.  G. D. Cerrini would later paint the frescoes of the nave and cupola celebrating the victory of the Virgin over the heretics while sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century an anonymous painter would depict in the sacristy four large scenes of the battle outside Prague.  Ruzola is shown in one detail fearlessly riding a charger into the fight while rays of divine energy stream forth from the image hung around his neck.   Within Bohemia the victory would be celebrated primarily through a series of engravings and special medals minted to commemorate the event.  A small pilgrimage complex would be built at White Mountain at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  Copies of the painting would be executed both for a church in Strakonice and for Our Lady Victorious in Malá Strana.
 Catholic preachers and writers proclaimed the same theme across the continent.  The Bavarian Jesuit Jeremias Drexel wrote with great conviction, “Truly on the octave of the feast of All Saints, the saints of heaven avenged themselves on the injury inflicted on them in Prague by the Calvinists who had cut off their hands, lips, noses and even heads.”   Texts and sermons poured out of Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany and of course Bohemia itself linking the fall of Frederick to the blasphemy he committed in the cathedral.    Tomas Pessina, a future dean of Prague’s cathedral, compiled many of these accounts and included them in his history of the cathedral.  The workman commissioned to demolish the tomb of St. Vitus was knocked senseless and lost the use of his hands for a significant period of time.  Much worse, however, was the fate in store for those charged to remove the grill around the grave of St. John Nepomuk.  A Hussite blacksmith who was initially sent in to do the job knew better and refused the assignment directly.  The Saxon Lutheran who replaced him was knocked on his back when he tried to take down the railing.  In a state of delirium and great pain, he was consumed by an internal fire that slowly killed him.   As Pessina pointed out, these developments were in no way surprising for there had long been a popular saying in Prague that whoever destroys St. Vitus would be promptly sent to hell.
The memory of December 1619 would become a permanent feature of the cathedral itself.  In the early 1620s the cabinet maker Caspar Bechteler would carve four large and intricate panels that depicted these events for the ambulatory of St. Vitus.   The first two scenes illustrate the Calvinists at work destroying the furnishings of the church.  One worker has climbed a ladder intent on bringing down the crucifix in front of the altar.  Others are busy smashing or breaking objects with axes, hammers and mallets.  Even the incident at Nepomuk’s tomb is recorded.  While two men are continuing to dismantle the railing, another two are carting off the Saxon ironworker who has just been knocked senseless.  It was the intent of the artist and designer to recall the destruction of Solomon’s Temple through these two panels, and the connection with the Biblical narrative was strengthened by one of the most prized possessions of the cathedral.  According to the chronicle of Dalimil (1314), the Jerusalem Candelabrum which had stood in St. Ludmila’s chapel had been originally taken by Titus from Jerusalem before passing on to Bohemia in the twelfth century.    The story is completed on the other side of the ambulatory.  With an inscription recounting the destruction of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, Frederick and his entourage are shown crossing the Moldau in haste, confusion and fear after their unexpected defeat at White Mountain.
An ironic testament to the brief reign of the Winter King, the panels, which are themselves a beautiful work of religious art, memorialized the policies of an individual who attempted to remove all such images from the cathedral.  The carving, however, was more than a clever joke at Frederick’s expense, for all those who busied themselves restoring St. Vitus were making a broader statement concerning the nature of artistic activity.  The Jerusalem Candelabrum, which had been badly damaged, would be carefully repaired and returned to the cathedral with a new shaft topped by the lamb triumphant and surrounded by four of Bohemia’s patron saints.  Emperor Ferdinand would donate a new triptych to replace the retable that had been destroyed by the Calvinists.  Its central scene, now the focal point of the church, was St. Luke painting the Virgin.  The apostle at work on his portrait would become a common motif in this period.  As I noted at the beginning of this paper, baroque art and architecture was not merely a byproduct of Bohemia’s Catholic restoration.  After the desecration of the Calvinists, the images had returned to St. Vitus victorious, and now the making of religious art was celebrated in and of itself as an act of orthodoxy.  Two decades ago, Clifford Geertz observed that art should not always be interpreted as a series of signs that need to be decoded to reveal the internal structure or cultural orientation of a specific society.  Art can often function as a self-contained language or idiom.   So it was in Bohemia, and in the wake of both the image-breakers and the devastation of war, image-makers, the kingdom’s painters, sculptors and architects would assume an importance new to their traditional station.