THE WILLAS AND RESIDENCES OF BOHEMIAN AND MORAWIAN NOBILITY C. 1600-1700 AND THEIR GENESIS
ANDRZEJ JÓZEF BARANOWSKI
The trend of placing a villa in the gardens by the castle in the Czech lands was started by Emperor Ferdinand I when he commissioned the building of Prague’s Belvedere. Around the middle of the XVI century, when the Habsburg villas known in Czech as letohradki were being built, an open residence with no defensive features, for example the villa in Kratochvile built by Wilhelm Rožnberk, was rare at this time in the Czech lands.
In the second half of the XVII century, Jean Baptiste Mathey, a Frenchman trained as a painter and architect in Rome, was commissioned by aristocrats such as Vaclav Sternberk, for whom he built the suburban Troja castle near to Prague, a building clearly influenced by the Villa Pamphilli in Rome.
Around 1700, a circle of distinguished architects directed residential architecture in the direction of the baroque, inspired first by the Roman school of Carlo Fontana and later towards the French school in the times of Ludwig XIV. Domenico Martinelli built enchanting villas in Buchlovice and Slavkov in Moravia.
The architectural models of the villa suburbana or villa rustica, which were created by Italian art during the Renaissance, cannot simply be transferred without qualification to the territories of Central Europe. In the époque of the dominance of aristocratic families in Bohemia and Moravia, the villa is most frequently a derivative of the palace art. In Italian principalities, the villa suburbana and rustica served as a complement to the main city residence, whereas in Central Europe the villa in such a character was limited to the elite fascinated by Italian art and culture.