revived in Bohemia the manufacture of objects of Catholic worship. In this connection he inaugurated at the Christian Academy, which had recently been founded, a fine tradition, afterwards successfully developed by the architects Hilbert and Fanta. On one occasion he matched himself against his contemporaries in a competition for a monumental subject—the St. Wenceslaus Church at Smíchov—and won the day. He put his whole artistic creed into this fine basilica, which has no equal in Prague. Its interior is a work of great beauty, graceful in its proportions and showing a perfect grasp of the decorative element and a thorough plastic and picturesque harmony.
The rapid upward flight of Czech architecture was to reach its zenith in a monument of universal interest, expressing a whole renascent nation’s will to live: the Prague National Theatre. The successful competitor for the design was Josef Zítek, a young architect who far outstripped his elder rivals by virtue of the wealth and facility of his invention and his untrammelled independence of thought. He too was a pupil of the famous Viennese pair, Van der Nüll and Siccardsburg, and his seven years’ apprenticeship had taught him practically all that Vienna knew in the realm of architecture. After travels in Italy and Western Europe, he settled in Prague, his native city, where the reputation he had won as builder of the Weimar Museum had already made him known. He opened his career in Bohemia with the Mill Colonnade at Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), but as soon as the first stone of the Prague Theatre was laid, he devoted himself exclusively to this national work.
A national work it undoubtedly was, the outcome of a whole people’s will, raised by the fine patriotic impulse of a subject nation, which paid for this temple out of its own pocket, without any support from Vienna, nay almost in the teeth of Vienna’s
