Vladislav Hall

This is a print, an engraving on paper rather than a painting, and it is one of the most admired feats of perspective made in the Bohemian lands. Aegidius Sadeler was a Flemish engraver from Antwerp who settled in Prague in the late 1590s and spent the rest of his life there in the service of Emperor Rudolf II, whose court had made the city a magnet for artists and instrument-makers and collectors of curiosities. In 1607 he cut this view of the Vladislav Hall inside Prague Castle, the vast vaulted room built so wide that knights once rode into it on horseback. Sadeler shows it during its annual fair, the great space busy with stalls and merchants and browsing courtiers under the sweeping ribs of the ceiling. He dedicated the plate to a high nobleman of Rudolf's court. Later artists leaned on this engraving whenever they needed to picture the hall, copying its careful recession of space, so that much of how the room is remembered goes back to the way Sadeler laid it out on a single sheet of copper in 1607.