Jan Dienstbier

Neidhart’s Pranks and Mural Paintings in Medieval Bohemia

This paper focuses on the visual context of Neidhart’s Pranks in medieval Bohemia. It draws attention primarily to one of the wall paintings in the House at the Golden Lily on the Malé náměstí (Small Square) in Prague, portraying the popular subject of the Violet Prank (Vielchenschwank). The paper points out references in in texts of Jan Hus and Stanislaus of Znojmo that prove that the comical anecdote about Neidhart’s violet was well known in Prague at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In Hus’s critique of paintings with themes from ‘The Life of Neidhart’ the Prague reformer could have had this story in mind, or even its depiction in the House at the Golden Lily itself. The Prague painting is compared with portrayals of Neidhart’s stories in German-speaking countries. A close look is taken at the galleries of rulers with emblems of various countries that accompany the Vielchenschwank in the Prague paintings. These can be understood as a kind of topology into which the story is inserted, apparently understood in the broader sense as a parable of the frequently deceptive appearance of things that may be handsome on the surface. Attention is also devoted to the recently discovered fragments of wall paintings at Nový hrad in Jimlín that probably portray another of Neidhart’s pranks about a barrel (Faẞschwank). The very end of the article deals with the dissemination of Neidhart’s anecdotes in the broader Bohemian context, pointing out the motif of a man dancing with a jug on his head that appears both in a poem by Bohuslav Hasištejnský of Lobkovice and in Neidhart’s portrayals abroad.

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