Kinsky Palace: A Rococo Urban Palace in Prague
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Czechia
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page7 sections
History
Kinsky Palace is a Rococo urban palace in Prague, Czechia, built between 1755 and 1765 for Johann Ernst Wenzel, Count von der Goltz. Standing on Prague’s Old Town Square, it was erected in the Baroque tradition while incorporating the lighter decoration of Rococo, an eighteenth-century style known for elaborate ornament and refined surfaces. The design came from court architect Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, who died in 1751 before construction began. The Italian builder Anselmo Lurago then continued the work.
From the Goltz family to the Kinskys
After Count von der Goltz died, his widow sold the palace to the Kinsky family in 1768. The Kinskys, a Bohemian noble family, owned the building until 1945, and their name became attached to both Kinsky Palace and its alternative designation, Goltz-Kinsky Palace. During their ownership, the interiors were restored in the Classicist style, reflecting the period’s renewed interest in forms and proportions inspired by ancient Greek and Roman architecture.
A later Baroque addition expanded the complex. In 1835, the palace was reconstructed and extended toward another building under the architect Kraner. These changes added new layers to a building whose principal character remained associated with its Rococo exterior and later Classicist interiors.
Residents, school, and diplomatic use
The palace was connected with several figures of cultural and political history. Anton Langweil lived there in 1819. Countess Bertha Kinsky was born in the palace on 9 June 1843 and spent part of her childhood there. Later known as Bertha von Suttner, she became an Austrian writer and peace activist, a major figure in the international pacifist movement, and the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1905.
From about 1880, the rear building housed a German-language state secondary school in Prague’s Old Town. Franz Kafka attended it from 1893 to 1901. His father, Hermann Kafka, later operated a haberdashery shop on the palace’s ground floor, documented there between 1912 and 1918. The building also housed the legation of the Republic of Poland from 1922 to 1934. A legation was a diplomatic mission headed by a minister rather than an ambassador.
Political memory and museum use
On 25 January 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald delivered a speech from the palace balcony. The address was later mistakenly conflated with a speech he had given on 21 January from a truck in Wenceslas Square, where he announced the resignation of the existing bourgeois government and the Communist takeover. In 1992, Václav Havel spoke from the same balcony while referring to the presumed earlier speech and declaring the end of the socialist system in the Czech lands. Havel was a Czech writer, dissident, and political leader who later became president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
Since 1949, Kinsky Palace has been used by the National Gallery Prague as an exhibition venue. It contains the gallery’s general directorate and permanent exhibitions devoted to ancient and Asian art and Czech landscape painting. The Asian collections include works from China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, the Middle East, and Mongolia. The palace entered the Czech Republic’s list of national cultural monuments in 1962.
Remains
Facade and principal arrangement
Kinsky Palace occupies an urban position on Prague’s Old Town Square. Its facade is finished with stucco and painted pink and white, with the stucco decoration attributed to S. Bossi. Numerous statues of ancient gods ornament the upper stories, produced by the workshop of Ignaz Franz Platzer, an eighteenth-century sculptor known for architectural and figurative work in Central European palaces and churches. Two symmetrically arranged entrances are linked by a narrow balcony on the second floor.
Additions and interior fabric
The later addition is Classicist, matching the character of the palace interiors after their restoration. In the northern part of the building, a medieval groin vault from one of the predecessor houses survives. This remnant belongs to the two medieval houses that occupied the site before the palace was erected in the eighteenth century.
Nearby sites
