Connoisseur’s Prague - Art, architecture and design, with privileged access

The capital of Bohemia scarcely needs introduction: long regarded as the most beautiful city in Central Europe, it has an abundance to delight the cultural traveller. Yet behind many a façade lie halls, rooms and works of art of exceptional interest, rarely accessible to the average visitor.

This tour seeks out such places, offering privileged access to the hidden as well as the celebrated. Principal sights are not neglected, but time is taken to explore them in greater depth, and wherever possible, in quieter moments, when the crowds have subsided. The emphasis is on thoughtful discovery: unhurried and away from the routine paths.

Prague enjoys an unequalled density of great architecture, from Romanesque to modern. Yet it is the fabric of the city as a whole rather than individual masterpieces which makes it so special. The city has the advantage of a splendid site, a crescent of hills rising from one side of a majestic bend in the River Vltava with gently inclined terrain on the other bank. A carapace of red roofs, green domes and gilded spires spread across the slopes and levels, sheltering a network of marvellously unspoilt streets, alleys and magically picturesque squares.

The full sweep of Czech art and architecture is explored, beginning in the fourteenth century, when Kings of Bohemia also reigned as Holy Roman Emperors, and Prague became one of the largest cities in the western world. The Gothic cathedral at the heart of the hilltop Royal Castle is one of the many monuments to this golden age, and the exquisite panel paintings, now excellently displayed in the Convent of St Agnes, are among the chief glories of the city.

From the sixteenth century onwards, despite political subordination within the Habsburg Empire, Prague retained both its prosperity and its cultural vitality. It became home to some of the finest Renaissance buildings in Central Europe. In the eighteenth century, the city attracted patronage of some of the great aristocratic families of the Baroque age, who commissioned palaces and churches of considerable splendour.

In the nineteenth century, the spirit of national revival – culminating in the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 – fostered a ferment of creativity among artists, writers and composers. A bewildering variety of styles, inspired by earlier Bohemian traditions, led Art Nouveau into innovative directions, and pioneered radical and distinctly Czech expressions at the dawn of modernism.