Kroměříž Castle

Did You Know?

• Interiors of the palace were used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace in the film Amadeus (1984).
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart never visited Kroměříž, though some of his compositions are stored in the castle's music archive.
• The largest part of the art collection was acquired by Bishop Karel in Cologne in 1673.

History

The bishops owned the town from the 13th century, losing control during the Hussite wars and regaining it in the 1470s. Bishop Stanislav I Thurzo replaced the castle with a more comfortable late Gothic residence in 1500, featuring some Renaissance detail. The Swedish army sacked the castle in 1643 during the Thirty Years' War. In 1664, a bishop from the Lichtenstein-Kastelkorn family commissioned architect Filiberto Lucchese to renovate the palace in Baroque style; Lucchese's chief work was the Pleasure Garden. A major fire gutted the castle in March 1752, after which Bishop Hamilton commissioned artists Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern to decorate the halls. The palace houses an art collection considered the second finest in the country, including Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, and holds a musical archive and a library of 33,000 volumes.

Landscape architecture and architecture

The castle and grounds were nominated for the World Heritage List in 1998. The nomination dossier states the castle is a good but not outstanding example of an aristocratic residence, while the Pleasure Garden is a very rare and largely intact Baroque garden. The Baroque landscapes were heavily influenced by the Italian Baroque, with the French Formal Baroque style also visible in the garden's layout on a flat site. Two Italian architects, Filiberto Lucchese and Giovanni Pietro Tencalla, designed and executed the site. The Pleasure Garden is located at a distance from the palace; 1691 engravings by Georg Matthaeus Vischer show a fully enclosed garden divided into ornamental parterre and southern orchards. A less formal 19th-century English garden near the palace sustained damage during floods in 1997.