Sternberg Palace

Sternberg Palace holds the National Gallery Prague's deepest concentration of pre-1800 European painting outside the medieval holdings at the Convent of St Agnes: an almost encyclopaedic run of German and Austrian Baroque and Renaissance art anchored by Durer's Feast of the Rose Garlands, alongside a substantial Netherlandish holding, smaller Italian, French, Spanish and English groups, and a rare collection of Russian Orthodox icons formed by the Byzantinist Nikodim Kondakov. Its strength lies in breadth across schools and centuries within a single building rather than depth in any one artist beyond Durer.

Sternberg Palace stands on Hradcanske namesti, facing the main gate of Prague Castle, on a site that had carried two Gothic houses since the mid-1300s. The palace itself was built after 1698 for Count Vaclav Vojtech of Sternberk, whose family name it still carries. Its architect is formally disputed: Giovanni Battista Alliprandi is the name most often given, with Domenico Martinelli and Jan Santini Aichel also proposed, and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Christoph Dientzenhofer occasionally speculated. Sternberg died in 1708 with the building only partly finished, and its southern wing stood incomplete for well over a century until Jan Novotny finally closed it off between 1835 and 1842.

The result is a building whose main facade is visibly split into two sections, a legacy of the two older Gothic houses it replaced. It is two storeys tall, arranged as four wings around a central courtyard, and built in a mixed Renaissance and Baroque style rather than a single unified design. Very little of the original Baroque interior survives; what a visitor walks through today is a layering of decorative schemes from different periods, reworked most recently for the museum's own display.

Sternberg Palace was not built as a museum, and it did not become the National Gallery's home until the 20th century. In the early 19th century - sources disagree on the exact year, giving either 1811 or 1814 - the building was bought by the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art, an aristocratic Czech association that had recently been evicted from Czernin Palace when the Austrian imperial government requisitioned that building as a military hospital. While the Society owned Sternberg Palace it lent part of the building to the Bohemian National Museum, which kept its own collections there from 1821 to 1847, and the palace served as a working space for Czech scholars including Pavel Josef Safarik, Karel Borivoj Presl, Vaclav Hanka and Antonin Manes.

The Society sold the palace in 1871 and moved to the mansion of Joseph Porges von Portheim. From 1872 the building housed the Ernestinum, a shelter for the mentally disabled run by the Saint Anna Association of Ladies and Girls, until that association left Prague in 1918; the palace then served as a military school until 1945. Only after the Second World War, in a renovation carried out from 1946 to 1947, did Sternberg Palace become the seat of the newly constituted National Gallery Prague - the starting point this record uses for the museum's founding date, as distinct from the building's own construction a quarter of a millennium earlier.

Sternberg Palace's most dramatic modern incident came in the disordered early years after the Velvet Revolution. President Vaclav Havel's amnesty of 1 January 1990 had released a large share of Czechoslovakia's prison population, security had not caught up with a newly open border across which stolen art could be moved west, and the palace's raised garden had no electronic security system. On the night of 6 May 1991, three men freed under the amnesty scaled the garden wall from the street, broke into the palace through an unguarded door, and stole four paintings by Pablo Picasso: Mandolin and Glass of Pernod (1911), Still Life with a Goblet (1922), Port of Cadaques (1910) and Absinthe and Cards (1912), together contemporaneously valued at around 1.5 billion Czechoslovak koruna. The thieves fled by car before the doorman raised the alarm, then tried to sell the paintings on the international black market - a move that eventually drew police attention. Investigators recovered three of the four paintings from one thief's apartment and the fourth from a railway station locker, and all four were returned to the palace.

Because Sternberg Palace had been owned by the Saint Anna Association of Ladies and Girls before nationalisation, the National Gallery raised its own concern, as Czech restitution law worked through the courts, that the building might be handed back to a successor of that charitable association. The claim did not succeed: reporting from January 2014 confirmed that properties held by the National Gallery, including Sternberg Palace, fell outside the restitution process.

The palace closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a planned repair programme during that closure was not completed as intended. It reopened in late 2020 with a new permanent exhibition, the current Old Masters II, deliberately built around the same tradition of exhibiting masterpieces that the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art had followed when it ran the building in the 19th century.

Old Masters II is the second half of the National Gallery's chronological survey of European painting before 1800, continuing across Hradcanske namesti from Old Masters I at Schwarzenberg Palace. Where the Schwarzenberg display marks the starting point of that journey, Sternberg Palace in practice covers the greater span of history and, by several visitor accounts, the more substantial collection. Its particular strengths are an almost encyclopaedic run of German and Austrian art from the Rudolphine era through the reign of Joseph II, an unusually large body of Dutch and Flemish painting from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and smaller but carefully chosen groups of Italian, French, Spanish and English work. Religious subjects dominate, reflecting both the period and the nature of the holdings, though portraits, still lifes and landscapes appear as the visitor moves through the rooms.

The single work every account of the palace leads with is Albrecht Durer's Feast of the Rose Garlands, bought to Prague at great expense by Rudolf II a century after it was painted and one of the treasures of his art-obsessed court. Around it sit Hans Baldung Grien's Beheading of Saint Dorothy, Hans Raphon's rare Passion altarpiece - the only fully preserved retable of its kind in a Czech public collection - and, from the Netherlandish rooms, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Rubens, van Dyck, Frans Hals and Rachel Ruysch. El Greco's Praying Christ and Agnolo Bronzino's portrait of Eleonora of Toledo represent the smaller Italian and Spanish holdings, and a rare collection of Russian Orthodox icons, assembled by the Byzantinist Nikodim Kondakov, sits inside the same display rather than in a department of its own.

A visit starts in the compact central courtyard, from which a monumental staircase leads up to the exhibition floors; the collection is arranged over three levels, and several visitors recommend starting at the top and working down. The surviving architectural features - high ceilings, stucco work and generous windows - are treated as a backdrop rather than a rival attraction, and some rooms keep a domestic scale that suits smaller paintings better than a conventional museum hall would. The building is not wheelchair accessible: stairs are the only way from the courtyard to the galleries. There is a cloakroom for coats and larger bags, a small shop selling National Gallery publications, and a small cafe near the garden. The elevated Baroque garden on the west side, overlooking the Deer Moat, is open seasonally from April to September and holds a pond, a stork sculpture by Jan Lauda and a bronze lion attacking a boa constrictor by Antoine-Louis Barye; its present form was laid out only in 1947, when the palace passed to the National Gallery, and does not reproduce the original Baroque garden.

Visitors consistently describe Sternberg Palace as a quiet, uncrowded counterpart to the tourist traffic at Prague Castle a few steps away, and are frequently surprised by the depth of the Old Masters collection once inside - several call it more rewarding than the companion display at Schwarzenberg Palace. The building's low-key, easy-to-miss entrance down a side passage off Hradcanske namesti comes up again and again, as does the modern three-floor layout with glass bridges between levels.