Clam-Gallas Palace

The portal on Husova Street in Prague's Old Town is guarded by four figures of Hercules. They are muscular, strained, and enormous — each figure carries part of the entablature of the doorway on his shoulders in the Baroque convention for atlas sculpture, their effort so theatrical and their scale so dominating that the pedestrian approaching from either direction on Husova encounters them as confrontation rather than ornament. They are the work of Matyáš Bernard Braun, the greatest Baroque sculptor in Bohemia, carved between 1713 and 1716 for a palace whose architectural ambition they perfectly announce.

The Clam-Gallas Palace was commissioned by Jan Václav Gallas, Count of Campo and Imperial Field Marshal — one of the most powerful military figures in the Habsburg Empire at the time — who wanted a residence in Prague's Old Town equal to the palatial architecture he knew from Vienna. To design it, he hired Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the pre-eminent Baroque architect of the Habsburg sphere. Fischer had designed the original Schönbrunn Palace project, the Karlskirche in Vienna, the Hofbibliothek, and the Vienna Hofburg's ceremonial additions. The Clam-Gallas Palace is the only secular residential building he designed in Bohemia — his single contribution to Prague's architectural history — and it introduced the Viennese High Baroque vocabulary into a city that had been working with its own distinct Bohemian Baroque tradition.

The building plan is organised around an arcaded courtyard, from which the grand ceremonial staircase rises to the piano nobile. The staircase is the architectural centrepiece of the interior: a single flight under a painted vault, wide enough to constitute a room in itself, designed to give the act of ascending to a noble's state apartments the processional character that Baroque court culture required. At the top of the staircase, a sequence of state rooms opens from the landing: the Golden Hall (Zlatý sál), the Turquoise Hall (Tyrkysový sál), the Marble Hall (Mramorový sál), and the Chinese Lounge (Čínský salónek), each with its ceiling fresco programme painted by Carlo Carlone between 1727 and 1730.

Carlone's frescoes are the interior equivalent of Braun's portal sculptures: allegorical compositions in the trompe-l'oeil tradition of Viennese Baroque ceiling painting, depicting mythological and heraldic subjects appropriate to the Gallas family's imperial military identity. The sequence of rooms moves from the formal grandeur of the Golden Hall through the more intimate painted decoration of the Turquoise Hall to the chinoiserie of the Chinese Lounge — a room that reflects the pan-European fashion for 'Chinese' ornament that simultaneously produced the Chinese rooms at Schönbrunn and Charlottenburg in the 1720s. The rooms as a whole represent one of the most intact surviving High Baroque residential interiors in Central Europe, undisturbed by the systematic 19th-century renovation that altered comparable palaces elsewhere.

The palace passed to the Clam family through the marriage of the last Gallas heiress and has been known as the Clam-Gallas Palace ever since. In the interwar period, Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš used it as a residence. After World War II and nationalization, it came under the management of the Prague City Archive, which occupies the building's working spaces while maintaining the piano nobile as a museum open to visitors.

This institutional arrangement produces one of the stranger experiences in Central European cultural tourism: a palace of genuine world architectural significance — designed by the greatest Baroque architect of the Habsburg sphere, with portal sculptures by its greatest Baroque sculptor, and ceiling frescoes by a master of Baroque decorative painting — accessible for approximately the price of a cinema ticket. The GYG entry ticket (t526046, from $9) includes admission and audio guide, making this arguably the most underpriced major Baroque interior in Europe.

[Prague Castle](/castles/czech-republic/prague-castle) — the sprawling hilltop complex across the Vltava that defines Prague's skyline and contains the Cathedral of St Vitus — is the essential companion for understanding the scale of Prague's architectural heritage. [Karlštejn Castle](/castles/czech-republic/karlstejn-castle) — the iconic 14th-century Gothic fortress 30km southwest — and [Český Krumlov Castle](/castles/czech-republic/cesky-krumlov-castle) extend the Bohemian castle circuit beyond the capital.