THE Prague Baroque was the last manifestation of great art in Bohemia. After the death of Dientzenhofer, the chief exponent of that style, the stream of invention dried up during the second half of the eighteenth century, and the mere builder’s trade established itself on the soil where Baroque had flourished in all its magnificence. The secularization of the monasteries, those main centres of activity for architects who worked on the grand scale, the partial abolition of forced labour (the corvée), the desertion of Prague by the aristocracy who went to live in Vienna, and finally the general impoverishment of the Czech lands after the Napoleonic Wars—such are the principal causes of a stagnation common indeed to the whole of Central Europe, but more noticeable in Bohemia than anywhere else. For several decades, therefore, men built from strictly utilitarian motives and only as much as was absolutely necessary. As for monumental architecture, all that was done was to adapt to new requirements some monument or other created in the prosperous days of bygone art. Thus there were no imposing schemes, no original ideas at a period when Prague herself, unseated from her throne, was ceasing to be a great city of European importance, and was becoming a sleepy little provincial town, filled with melancholy survivals, still admired, of mediæval and Baroque art, but stifled
