The greatest art theft of modern times did not take place in Benin City, but in Prague. In July 1648 a Swedish army conquered the Lesser Town in Prague with the Hradschin. When the news reached Stockholm at the beginning of August, Queen Christina immediately wrote to her cousin (and later successor) Karl Gustav von Pfalz-Zweibrücken, who was in command, that he should “reserve” all art treasures in his sphere of influence for her. In particular, the cousin was supposed to take the famous collection of Emperor Rudolf II "into safekeeping". In the following months almost 500 paintings, 69 bronzes, a good 30,000 coins and medals, 179 ivory works, a few hundred pieces of jewelry and tableware as well as entire library holdings were shipped across the Baltic Sea. When the Swedes finally withdrew from Prague in September 1649,they had not only emptied the imperial castle, but also the Waldstein palace and the Strahov monastery.
Andreas Kilb
Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
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The Prague raid was the culmination of an unprecedented series of looting. Never before have so many cultural assets changed hands in such a short time as in the Thirty Years' War. As a rule, the booty makers were not led by everyday villains, but by aristocratic art connoisseurs. The Bavarian Duke Maximilian stole the Heidelberg Biblioteca Palatina from the Palatinate Elector Friedrich and gave it to the Pope. The Swedish King Gustav Adolf plundered Maximilian's Munich residence. This in turn enriched himself with the treasures of the Württemberg Duke Eberhard. The northern Italian Mantua had already been fielded by imperial officers. Smaller princely seats, monasteries and imperial cities were routinely combed out.At the end of the thirty years of slaughter, there had been a redistribution from southern to northern Europe, which still shapes the cultural heritage of the countries concerned today.
The chronicle and the consequences of the art theft at that time are one of the topics to which the exhibition “Bellum et Artes” in the Dresden Green Vault is dedicated - unfortunately not the main topic, as one would have hoped given the current debates about looted and looted art in the colonial age. But when it came to dealing more thoroughly with cultural “translocations”, as the customary euphemism goes, the Dresden curators may have had their own collection history in the way. Because unlike Leipzig, which was conquered three times alone, and many other Saxon places, the capital of the electorate never fell into enemy hands during the Thirty Years' War. That is why the treasures of Johann Georg I, especially the armory and the art chamber, were not looted,and vice versa, no looted property worth mentioning from other princely residences reached Dresden.
The curators therefore follow the historical logic when they place Johann Georg and his second wife Magdalena Sibylle von Prussia, whose double portrait hangs on the front of the large exhibition room, at the center of their presentation. Both reached a very old age for their time; her reign spanned the entire duration of the Thirty Years' War. For Johann Georg, the "Bierjörge", as he was called by scoffers because of his tendency to drink, this meant that he had to choose again and again between the warring religious alliances and warring European powers. In 1619, when he was offered the crown of Bohemia, he decided for the emperor in Vienna, a good ten years later, after the edict of restitution and the destruction of Magdeburg, for the Swedes and in 1635, in the Peace of Prague,again for the emperor. Another decade later, his country was so drained by the war that he concluded a neutrality agreement with the Swedish occupiers.