The legend of the princess and prophetess Libuse and the ploughman Premsyl, the mythical founder of the first Bohemian royal dynasty can be traced back to the 10th century. After she has been criticised by for making a wrong decision, the wise Princess Libuse sends for Premsyl to join her and rule the land. Her messengers find the farmer ploughing his fields and call him away from there to take the throne.

The legend has been a component of the official state Premsylid ideology since the 12th century and thereafter a basic element of Bohemian patriotism and historical heritage. At first a symbol and prototype of the wise and just ruler, the saga was gradually transformed - around the middle of the 19th century under the influence of the historian and national leader Frantisek Palacky´ - into the Czech national myth. From this time on it stood for a proto-democratic, anti-feudalistic self-awareness of the Czech population, embodied by the ploughman on the throne. Moreover, the peasant origin of the Premsylid dynasty corresponded to the ideology of a national rebirth which saw the foundation of true »Czechdom« in the rural life of the peasants. In this interpretation Libuse and Premsyl have become symbols of the emancipatory Czech society.

Prague gained exceptional importance in this context as thousand-year-old centre of Bohemian Czech statehood; the legend relates that Libuse not only prophesied Prague’s fame, but also laid the cornerstone for the metropolis by building Vysehrad castle.

Faith and War

Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, 1415

Jan Hus, like none other, was the pre-eminent symbolic figure for the Czech national movement. He was remembered as a patriot who standardised the Czech literary language and honoured as representative of Czech nationalism because of his struggle for the rights of Czechs at Prague University. But he advanced to a figure of national integration primarily through his death as a martyr. However, Hus did not enter Czech national consciousness primarily as an ecclesiastical reformer who sacrificed his life for his works and belief, but above all as a champion of freedom in the late middle ages.

The Czech myth of Hus and most of the artistic and literary representations of him in the 19th century concentrate on Hus' last days in Constance, from his defence to his death in the flames. Among the most popular history paintings is the large-format oil painting »Jan Hus at the Council of Constance« by Václav Brozík from 1883, shown here in a print, which depicts him in the famous pose of Luther at the Diet of Worms: »Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me! Amen.« In his painting »Black Earth« Karel Javurek portrays two Bohemian nobles in mourning at the site of Hus' execution, a work that aims to keep alive the memory of the sacrifice of the Czech national hero.

Freedom

The Battle of White Mountain, 1620

The Bohemian insurrection began with the so-called »Defenestration of Prague« of May 1618, and these events in Bohemia marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. Underlying the uprising of the predominantly Protestant Bohemian estates were years of confrontation with the ruling Habsburg dynasty and its efforts to centralise its rule and restore Catholicism. The break with King Ferdinand II, his deposal and the election of the Calvinist elector Friedrich V of the Palatinate as »Winter King« in 1619 led to the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. After only two hours of fighting it ended in the total victory of the imperial troops and the allied Catholic League over the Palatine-Bohemian army, the flight of King Friedrich and the execution of 27 leaders of the insurrection.

Three hundred years later the Czech national movement determined the 8th of November 1620 as that »fateful day«, as was written everywhere, when »freedom of belief was buried on White Mountain, the people ravished by the imperial army and the freedom of the nation smothered.« The battle became fixed in the collective memory as the beginning of lost national independence, of the subjugation, bondage and humiliation of the Czech people. This is why the actual turmoil of battle was not often the central theme of the artistic representations. Instead they showed the battlefield which the Polish poet of liberty Karol Malisz styled the »Czech Golgotha« in 1848, or scenes on the theme of the restoration of Catholicism in Bohemia.