The House of the Knights
The Town Art Gallery of Litomyšl is located in the ancient House of the Knights, which is one of the oldest and highly-prized town buildings. Thanks to its well-preserved original decorated facade and part of the interior, the house ranks among the jewels of Renaissance urban architecture in Bohemia.
Like most of the houses in the town square, the House of the Knights is set on a long and narrow plot dating back to the Gothic era. Part of a terrace of houses, it is situated in the middle of the square, almost opposite the town hall tower. Its stylistic conception refers to the artistic circuit of the Court of Pernštejn in Pardubice. Thanks to its aesthetic quality, it was declared a cultural monument in 1958.
HISTORY OF THE HOUSE OF THE KNIGHTS
The House of the Knights was rebuilt into its present Renaissance form by the master stonemason Blažek, who probably started to build it for himself after the great fire that engulfed the town in 1540. It is likely that he had completed the renovation by 1546.
In the course of its life, the building lost part of its Renaissance character through numerous modifications. The first major transformation that changed the appearance of the house took place in 1814, when the original, probably tall Renaissance gable was replaced by one in the Empire style.
In 1962, the first documented restoration work was carried out on the building. To deal with the compromised statics of the house, the three original arcade pillars were replaced with pressed artificial stone copies. The task was assigned to Olbram Zoubek, the sculptor who, with his team, later restored the facade of the Renaissance castle in Litomyšl. One of the original pillars is stored in the Regional Museum in Litomyšl and can currently be seen in the museum’s permanent exhibition.
Until the 1970s. the House of the Knights was used for housing. Between 1975 and 1977, it was extensively renovated in order to accommodate a permanent exhibition of the painter Josef Matička, who donated a large collection of his own paintings and part of his collection of Czech art of the first half of the 20th century (including works by Emil Filla, Josef Čapek, Josef Lada and others) to the town. In the course of the renovation works, several discoveries were made: an early Renaissance coffered ceiling in the first-floor room facing the square, seats between windows as well as early Renaissance mullions with capitals richly decorated with vegetal motifs. The extraordinary nature of these discoveries is emphasised by the fact that they contain fragmentary remains of original polychromy. The restoration of the monument was assigned once again to Olbram Zoubek, who is also the creator of the commemorative plaque on the facade with the inscription “Josef Matička Gallery”.
The Matička collection of was only briefly exhibited in the house. Despite the conditions specified in the donation contract, by 1985 Matička’s works were placed in a depository and exhibited only occasionally. The premises began to be used by the former Museum and Gallery in Litomyšl. Its successor, the Town Art Gallery of Litomyšl, has been using the building for temporary exhibitions since 2004. And this is still the case.
The most recent restoration work on the facade dates back to the year 2000. It was undertaken by students of what is today the Faculty of Restoration of the University of Pardubice under the guidance of Jindřich Plotica. The stone elements of the facade were reinforced and cleaned, missing elements were remodelled and attached.
NAME
The original name of the house was The Golden Horns, its current name is based on the relief stone figures of the knights on the facade and was first used by Alois Jirásek in his short story At the Knights (1879). It was part of his book called Small Town Tales, which contains two more stories capturing the atmosphere of the town of Litomyšl at the time – At the Old Post Office and History of Philosophy.
Alois Jirásek very much appreciated the atmosphere of Litomyšl and spent fourteen years teaching geography and history at the local grammar school (1874-1888).
EXTERIOR
The facade of the one-storey house crowned with a gable roof is made of stone blocks. Horizontally, it is defined by two arches of the arcade decorated with archivolts and a sculptural palmette pattern. The sculpting is prominent on the window level and the frieze above. The windows are flanked by fluted pilasters resting on window ledges and covered with reliefs of acanthus and ovolo. They are supported by fluted consoles.
The most striking element of the facade, however, is the figurative relief decoration dominated by the two knights from whom the house derives its name. In addition to these, there are two figures of men in period civilian attire embracing columns, one holding a book, the other a pouch.
The intricately profiled cornices with palmettes and egg-and-dart moulding leap back at both ends. Reliefs of fantastic animals (dolphins, unicorns, lions and beasts with human heads and lion’s paws, wings and tails) cover the areas between the cornices and windows, with bearded heads in the gaps.
Between the overmantel and the main cornice runs a frieze, with two lions in the centre and two spheres at the sides. Between them are semicircular archivolts with rich, partly figurative motifs depicting a newt, griffin and nereid.
The complete meaning behind the figures and symbols on the facade has still not been decyphered. However, a detailed stylistic analysis of the facade has shown that the reliefs did not come from the hands of a single master, but involved at least two stonemasons.
INTERIOR
CORRIDOR
Traces of the Renaissance character of the house have also been preserved in its interior. The most recent conservation survey in 2012 discovered original Renaissance painted decorations under the plaster on the Renaissance barrel vault in the ground floor corridor. In contrast, photographs taken in 1973 show a historicizing mural from the second half of the 19th century on the vault of the corridor. However, a new survey did not yield evidence of this painting, so it was probably removed and the vault whitewashed during the 1977 renovation.
RENAISSANCE HALL
In the room on the first floor facing the square, there is a noteworthy Renaissance coffered ceiling. It is made of spruce from trees that were, according to dendrochronological analysis, felled between 1534 and 1537.
Original mullions and a part of a window seat have also survived. The sides of the pillars, the capitals and plinths were richly decorated with stone ornamentation and polychromed with sharp tones of red, yellow-green and green-blue. Only a part of the window seat has been preserved. A plaster negative was taken from the existing profile of the seat and a mould was made from it. The seat was then pressed out of a corresponding malleable material and finished.
