Václav Vavřinec Reiner (1689–1743), Allegorical Variation on the Vision of Pope Innocent III with the Collapsing Lateran Basilica, Defended by Dominican Saints against the Attack of Heretics, 1734–35, fresco, nave vault, Kostel svatého Jiljí (Church of Saint Giles), Prague.
The Battle of White Mountain, fought on 8 November 1620, lasted approximately two hours. Outside Prague, a Bohemian Protestant army, formed from estates that had been in open revolt against the Habsburgs since the Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618, was decisively defeated by a combined Imperial and Catholic League force. The religious pressures culminating in that morning’s battle had arguably been building in the Bohemian lands since the Hussite wars of the early fifteenth century. The history of the Kostel svatého Jiljí (St Giles Church) between 1339 and 1620 offers a condensed account of the religious tensions that preceded Bohemia’s re-Catholicisation. Consequently, the frescoes painted on its vault in 1734–35 can only be fully understood when viewed against this historical backdrop.
In the months following White Mountain, Ferdinand II revoked the Letter of Majesty, the charter issued by Rudolf II on 9 July 1609, which had guaranteed religious freedoms to the Bohemian estates. Ferdinand reportedly tore the document with his own hands. The subsequent war led to a demographic catastrophe marked by battle, famine, epidemic, and forced displacement. The Holy Roman Empire as a whole lost approximately a quarter of its population (Wilson, 2009), while the Bohemian lands suffered much greater losses by most estimates. However, as the figures rise, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between those who died and those who simply emigrated, carrying their faith across the border to escape re-Catholicisation (Cerman, 1994). On 21 June 1621, twenty-seven leaders of the uprising — three noblemen, seven knights, and seventeen burghers — were executed in the Old Town Square. Twelve of their heads were impaled on the Old Town Bridge Tower, with some reportedly still hanging there in 1631.
By 1625, Ferdinand had granted the Kostel svatého Jiljí, a Gothic church a short walk from the square, to the Dominican order. This was no ordinary confiscated parish; the building had been Hussite and Utraquist for two hundred years. Prior to that, it had housed the preacher from whom the entire Bohemian theological reform movement originated. A generation before him, the church had been founded by a bishop who spent eleven years in Avignon responding to a Dominican’s accusations of protecting heretics. Every layer of its history stood in stark contrast to the order that received it. The artwork subsequently commissioned for the ceiling in the eighteenth century does not erase this history but rather arranges its own narrative in front of it, selectively choosing what to mourn, what to claim, and what to leave entirely unaddressed.
The collegiate chapter, documented on the site from at least 1238, was attached to a Romanesque church, the foundations of which lie beneath the present structure. The Gothic church that replaced it was commissioned in 1339 by John of Dražice (c.1260–1343), the penultimate Bishop of Prague.
John had spent eleven years at the papal court in Avignon, where the papacy had been based since 1309. In 1318, Jindřich ze Šumburka, the Dominican provost of Litoměřice and a long-standing personal adversary, brought accusations against him. These included disobedience to the pope, simony, indulgence towards heretics, and obstruction of inquisitors (Hledíková, 1991, cited in Marin, 2020). The curia prolonged the case for eleven years, extracting money from the defendant. John was fully acquitted and returned to Bohemia by 1329, having observed the building boom in the new papal city.
The church he commissioned at home reflected these observations: a three-aisled basilica without a separate presbytery, broad and rectangular in the French Gothic hall style, featuring buttressed walls, pointed arches, and paired towers at the west front.
John died in 1343 with the church unfinished. His successor, Arnošt of Pardubice (1297–1364), the first Archbishop of Prague, continued the work. The completed building was consecrated on 4 May 1371 by the second archbishop, Jan Očko of Vlašim (d.1380), with Charles IV of Luxembourg (1316–1378), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, in attendance. By then, Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, later considered the father of the Bohemian reform, had already arrived.
Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (Latin: Milicius de Chremsir, died 1374) arrived at the church in 1364, while it was still under construction. Until 1363, he had held prestigious appointments as registrar and then corrector in the imperial chancery, along with a canonry at St Vitus Cathedral with the rank of archdeacon. He abandoned these positions for a preaching career (Morée, 1999; Janega, 2015). Milíč preached in Czech, a reforming act at the time, directly challenging clerical wealth and lax morals, which earned him enemies.
In 1372, his preaching led a number of Prague’s prostitutes to abandon their profession. Charles IV granted Milíč a working brothel in Konviktská Street, known as Venice, along with surrounding plots. On this site, Milíč built a chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and housing for the women, naming the foundation Jerusalem (Mengel, 2004). The community lived a common life of prayer there until his death.
In 1367, Milíč travelled to Rome, believing the Church’s condition signalled the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. He posted a notice for a sermon on the Antichrist at St Peter’s Cathedral, intending to deliver it before Urban V, who had briefly returned the papal court from Avignon to Rome. The Inquisition arrested him. While in confinement, he wrote the Libellus de Antichristo, presenting it to Urban V upon the pope’s return in October 1367. He was subsequently released by papal order.
Urban V returned to Avignon in 1370, dying there on 19 December. His successor, Gregory XI, elected on 30 December, maintained the papal court in France. In Lent 1374, Milíč was summoned to Avignon following the Prague clergy’s lodging of twelve articles against him (Janega, 2015). Although cleared and licensed to preach before the cardinals, he died in Avignon on 29 June 1374. Gregory XI eventually returned the papacy to Rome in January 1377.
Within a generation, Jan Hus (c.1369–1415) escalated the reforming impulse Milíč had initiated from this pulpit, leading to a confrontation with the Council of Constance, which resulted in his burning in 1415. The movement that emerged in his memory pitted the Bohemian estates against the Holy Roman Empire, repelling five consecutive crusades between 1420 and 1431 (Fudge, 2010). From the mid-1420s, the Hussites launched their own incursions into neighbouring territories, transforming the conflict from a purely defensive struggle. The subsequent Compactata represented the institutional Church’s first negotiated concession to a movement it had condemned as heretical; no challenge of comparable scale would test papal authority again until Luther. However, this concession did not endure. Pope Pius II annulled the Compactata in 1462, leading to a second phase of crusading warfare from 1467. Nevertheless, Utraquism survived both challenges, remaining the dominant confession in Bohemia under the Jagiellonian kings throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, its position secured more by the kingdom’s political realities than by papal recognition.
In 1420, the community of canons established by John of Dražice at the church ceased to exist. The building then passed into Utraquist hands as a parish, where it remained for two centuries. It is important to note that the term ‘Protestant’ is often incorrectly applied here, leading to significant confusion when interpreting the church’s ceiling. Utraquism predates the Reformation by a century, and its core demand was both older and narrower than any of Luther’s reforms: sub utraque specie, or the insistence that the laity receive the Eucharist in both wine and bread, a practice condemned by Rome since the Council of Constance.
In all other respects, the Utraquists remained Catholic, maintaining the same liturgy, the cult of the saints, and an unbroken episcopal succession. Their representatives reached an agreement with the Council of Basel, ratified in the Compactata signed at Jihlava in 1436, which conceded the chalice within Bohemia and Moravia (Kaminsky, 1967). This concession, however reluctant, was a formal recognition of a liturgical variation that Rome chose to absorb rather than continue to oppose. Thus, under the Compactata, the Utraquists at St Giles in the subsequent century were not, in any strict canonical sense, outside the Catholic Church.
Therefore, the fresco programme installed above their former nave in 1734–35, whose central theme is the defeat of heresy, was, in a precise historical sense, directed at a congregation whose position Rome had already ratified. However, the Dominicans did not acknowledge such distinctions. As the papal Inquisition’s primary instrument since Gregory IX appointed them in 1231, they were charged with policing the boundary between Catholic orthodoxy and everything beyond it (Given, 1997). For them, a church that offered its laity the chalice stood on the wrong side of that line, regardless of what else it maintained.
Centuries later, the situation became further complicated by the arrival of Lutheran ideas across the border. The estates that defended the Letter of Majesty in 1618 were a diverse group, including Lutherans, the Unity of the Brethren, and Utraquists of various persuasions. However, the congregation that took St Giles in 1420 was none of these later groups.
The Utraquists held the building throughout the sixteenth century, enduring both the Reformation and the Council of Trent. Their position was secured by the Letter of Majesty in 1609, granted by Rudolf II, which guaranteed existing religious freedoms. This guarantee lasted for nine years, collapsing over a property dispute. Ferdinand II, King of Bohemia from 1617, who sought Catholic uniformity, closed or demolished two Protestant churches built on land claimed by the Catholic Church. Protesting petitioners were subsequently arrested. On 23 May 1618, Defensors of the estates gathered in Prague, and nobles threw two regents, who had supported these measures, from a castle window. The Battle of White Mountain followed two years later, and the church changed hands within five.
By 1731, when redecoration commenced, Bohemia’s re-Catholicisation was largely complete. This was achieved through cultural replacement, encompassing the rewriting of history, the rebuilding of ecclesiastical interiors, the Jesuit schooling of noble families, and the replacement of the Utraquist landowning class with Catholic newcomers loyal to the Habsburgs (Louthan, 2009). Utraquist estates had vanished, their libraries dispersed, and their children raised in the faith their grandparents had resisted.
At St Giles, Václav Špaček, working under architect František Maxmilián Kaňka (1674–1766), began remaking the interior while retaining the Gothic shell. The broad, flat vault, a Czech placka lacking transverse arches, was designed for monumental fresco. Václav Vavřinec Reiner (1689–1743) received the fresco commission, and Bernardo Spinetti, an Italian based in Bohemia, created the stucco. The cycle was completed between 1734 and 1735.
The main vault, commonly known as the Triumph of the Dominican Order over Heresy, is more accurately an allegorical reinterpretation of Pope Innocent III’s vision. Legend states that before approving the Dominican order, Innocent dreamt of the collapsing Lateran Basilica being supported by a friar he later identified as Dominic. Reiner depicted this vision across the vault in illusionistic perspective: the basilica tilts, Dominic stands at its threshold, Thomas Aquinas and other Dominican saints hold the line, and heretics are depicted below with overturned books, a traditional symbol of defeated doctrine. Lesser vaults celebrate Dominic and his attributes, including the dog with a flaming torch from his mother’s dream. Saint Giles has a dedicated vault depicting the French hermit, whose sole companion was a hind, lamed by a hunter’s arrow intended for the animal, making him the patron of the disabled. The high altar, carved by Ignác František Weiss (fl.1730s–1760s), features a Crucified Christ Venerated by Dominican Saints painted by Antonín Stevens (fl.1650s–1680s) in 1660–62.
Two scenes in the cycle record what the order lost, and they stand apart from the triumph. One depicts the murder of John of Schwenkenfeld, the papal inquisitor for Silesia, who was stabbed in Prague in 1341 and venerated by the Dominicans as a martyr. The order sought his canonisation but never obtained it. The other scene portrays the plundering of the convent of St Clement by the Judith Bridge, the Dominicans’ principal Prague house. Hussite forces stormed it on 8 August 1420, and it was never restored to its former scale [Havrda, Kovář and Žďárská, 2017]. The order held the damaged site for another five generations before ceding it to the newly arrived Jesuits in the 1550s. The Jesuits then erected the Clementinum, the largest Jesuit college in Bohemia, over its ruins, leaving the Dominicans without a major Prague foundation until they acquired St Giles in 1625.
The Schwenkenfeld fresco does something no chronicle would permit: it conflates the inquisitor’s death with the storming of the convent, eighty years apart, into a single image, as if the order’s injuries were one continuous wound. This was not the case. The murder and the storming belong to different centuries, different political contexts, and different stages of the Bohemian reform. Collapsing them is a deliberate choice, the same selective process at work in the vault above, where the Church prevails and the heretics fall, and no painting acknowledges the two centuries this particular nave spent on the opposing side of the argument.
The fresco programme was designed for a Catholic congregation raised entirely within the re-Catholicised order, for whom the building’s two-hundred-year history as something other than a Dominican church was a sealed archive. The triumph on the vault required no opposition. Selection operates most efficiently when the opposing side has already been removed, and by 1731, it had been, thoroughly and for a long time.
Reiner lies in front of the altar of Saint Vincent, beneath the ceiling he painted. From Husova Street, the church presents a plain Gothic front, giving no indication of what was painted inside, or why.
References
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