bear further witness to their initiator’s good taste and to his judicious exercise of his dictatorial authority. The provincial towns of Bohemia, especially the district capitals, had as a matter of fact never been better governed from an architectural point of view or more skilfully systematized than under the sway of these departmental engineers, if indeed we except a few blunders made in conformity with official edicts, such as the destruction here and there of old fortifications or of a decorative entrance gate.
So far as original or imposing buildings are concerned, the period was entirely insignificant. The material and spiritual causes of this phenomenon have already been explained at the beginning. In its educational and official organisation, Prague was entirely dependent upon Vienna, and up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the latter city produced nothing except local versions of the great French artists. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the leading personality in this respect was Peter de Nobile, the Court architect and director of the Architectural School at the Viennese Academy. He planned the outer portal of the Hrad (1821–1824) and the charming chapel of These (1823). In contrast to his precise form, the normal bureaucratic style was represented by his pupil, the Court Architectural Counsellor Vil. Paul Sprenger who, as an actual authority, for a long time monopolised all public buildings upon which he imposed that official uniformity of character known contemptuously as “Vice-Governor” style. The adherents of these two leaders, such as Josef Hardtmuth, Josef Kornhäusel, K. Moreau, L. von Montoyer, Josef Schemerl von Laytenbach, and E. L. Pichl produced the average Viennese Empire style without any particular monumental outline. The two chief centres of the Empire style in Western Europe, Paris and Berlin, exerted but an indirect influence on Bohemia: the ideas underlying the
