The Magic of Image: Astrological, Alchemical and Magical Symbolism at the Court of Wenceslas IV
The Magic of Image: Astrological, Alchemical and Magical Symbolism at the Court of Wenceslas IV

Author(s): Milena Bartlová
Subject(s): History, Cultural history, Customs / Folklore, Middle Ages, Culture and social structure
Published by: Historický ústav SAV
Keywords: magic; symbolism; middle ages; images; astrology; alchemy; Court of Wenceslas IV;
Summary/Abstract: The Czech Renaissance man of letters Václav Hájek of Libočany explained the representations of kingfishers and half naked bathmaidens that he saw painted on some Prague buildings, as records of saucy affairs from the life of the King Bohemia Wenceslas IV. He developed in this way the image of a bad and immoral ruler, coined by the many political and religious enemies acquired by Wenceslas during the almost forty years of his turbulent rule around the year 1400. Three and a half centuries later, Julius Schlosser, the art historian writing in Freud’s Vienna in the 80s of the 19th century, recognized an extensive group of similar symbolic images in the margins of Wenceslas’ illuminated codices. He called them emblems and explained them as a form of aesthetic sublimation of the erotic relationship between the king and his second wife Sophia of Bavaria. In the 1960s, the Czech art historian Josef Krása recognized the deepest sense of the complex symbolic meanings of these images in a celebration of natural life, as opposed to the fetters of social conventions.

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