The Memory of the “Stone Book”

Charles IV founded St Vitus Cathedral on the foundations of an older basilica in 1344. The emperor, introduced to the principles of esotericism during his youth in France, sought to shape the wider urban fabric of Prague according to his cosmological creed, as a great calendar in which celestial events found their counterpart in the arrangement on earth. For this purpose he invited eminent architects associated with the western tradition of builders’ brotherhoods. Matthias of Arras established a building lodge at Prague Castle, where the construction plans on which he had worked before coming to Prague were kept. Later the emperor summoned Peter Parler from Schwäbisch Gmünd, an architect linked to the building guilds of Cologne and Ulm. This master’s name can be understood as “speaking stone,” pierre parlante, surely an apt description of an artist who let the cathedrals’ “stone books” speak. It is no coincidence that his surname points to a French origin, rooted in parleur, “talker,” an ironic slang term for a representative of Art gothique, Gothic art. For, to use Fulcanelli’s words, a cathedral is as much a work of art goth as of argot. A secret language, along with symbols and rituals, was the shared, concealed property of the builders’ brotherhoods. In light of these details, it seems telling that shortly before work stopped in 1418, the name Peter appears once again, this time only as the diminutive Petrlík, as though the name itself embodied the decline into which construction fell during the Hussite Wars and characterised work that maintained rather than created. St Vitus was intended to house the crown and cathedral jewels. It was also conceived as the final resting place of Bohemian saints — St John of Nepomuk is buried in the chapel bearing his name and St Vitus behind the high altar — and of kings headed by Charles IV, buried in the Chapel of the Holy Cross, where Rudolf II also rests, among others. The fifth side chapel on the right, on the cathedral’s southern side, is St Wenceslas Chapel, decorated with scenes from the saint’s life. Spaces between the pictures are inlaid with Bohemian agates and chrysoprases set in gilded mortar. The chapel’s dominant significance is emphasised by the great tower rising directly above it. Its position relative to the Old Town tower of Charles Bridge was arranged so that, when viewed from the Bridge Tower’s axis at the summer solstice, the setting sun shines precisely in the lantern of St Vitus’s tower above this chapel, where the royal crown rests on the skull of St Wenceslas, patron saint of Bohemia. During his stay in Prague, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire found his own likeness here in one of the agates near the ring which St Wenceslas supposedly grasped as he died in Boleslav.