Franz Xaver Karl Palko

In 1753 the Jesuits of Prague's Lesser Town hired a 29-year-old painter from Breslau, today's Wrocław, to paint the dome of their new church of St Nicholas. The city's painters' guild objected, because Franz Xaver Palko was not one of its members. The magistrates let him carry on, ruling that his title of court painter to the Elector of Saxony counted for as much as guild membership. The dome he painted shows the open heavens, with Christ and God the Father glorified by a great choir of saints.

Palko had learned first from his father Anton, then at the Vienna Academy, and in the 1740s in Venice, where the warm, loose manner of the Bolognese painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi left a clear mark on him. Before Prague he worked for church and noble patrons in Bratislava, Kroměříž and Brno, and around 1747 he painted the empress Maria Theresa with her husband and their young son Joseph. His brother Franz Anton was a painter as well.

The Belvedere holds a small picture of his on copper, Christ Blessing the Children. His end is uncertain. Most sources place his death in Prague in 1767, while others put it in Munich around 1770, after an attempt to win the favour of the Bavarian court.