Sternberg Palace

Sternberg Palace (Czech: Šternberský palác) is a Baroque building in Prague, Czech Republic. It currently serves as a gallery of the National Gallery Prague and is a cultural monument.

The site of the Sternberg Palace previously held two Gothic houses from the mid 1300s. The palace was built after 1698 by Václav Vojtěch of Šternberk, for whom it was named after. The architect is unknown, the most commonly named people are Giovanni Battista Alliprandi, Domenico Martinelli and Jan Santini Aichel, through Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Christoph Dientzenhofer are also occasionally speculated. The southern wing of the building would remain unfinished, before being fully constructed from 1835 to 1842 by Jan Novotný.

In the early 1880s the palace was purchased by the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art, an aristocratic Czech association that managed a large gallery. The Patriotic Friends of the Arts had recently been evicted from the Czernin Palace, which the government of the Austrian Empire requisitioned for use as a military hospital. While owned by The Patriotic Friends of the Arts, the building often housed several other occupants. From 1821 to 1847 they lent a section of the building to the Bohemian National Museum to house its collections. The palace also served as a workplace for major Czech figures of the sciences and humanities, such as Pavel Josef Šafařík, Carl Borivoj Presl, Václav Hanka and Antonín Mánes.

The Patriotic Friends of the Arts would remain in the palace until 1871 when they sold the building and moved to the mansion of Joseph Porges von Portheim. In 1872 the Saint Anna Association of Ladies and Girls founded the Ernestinum, a shelter for the mentally disabled in the palace. They would move out of Prague in 1918, and the palace was used as a military school until 1945. From 1946 to 1947 the building was renovated and made the seat of the National Gallery Prague.

In early 1991, the Sternberg Palace experienced a major art theft. The immediate years following the Velvet Revolution saw an extremely high rise in theft due to several reasons. President Václav Havel granted amnesty to a majority of Czechoslovakia's prisoners on human rights grounds. Additionally, security had not adapted to a more open society, and an open border to the west across which art could be smuggled.

Text adapted from “Sternberg Palace” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sternberg Palace ranks #2,916 of 8,133 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #78 of the 203 mapped in Czech Republic. Founded 1698, it is older than 23% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 626 atlas entries founded in the 17th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,233 times in the last 60 days, more than 54% of the atlas. 22 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Prague, 2 km away. It is one of the 159 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of Bohemia. It is stop 13 of 28 on the Bohemian castle route, Prague to Český Krumlov. See how Czech Republic compares in the castle statistics.

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