Convent of St Agnes of Bohemia

Museum · Staré Město (Old Town), riverside north-east edge (near U Milosrdných)Prague,Czechia

A thirteenth-century Poor Clare house in Prague founded by a king's daughter who refused her marriages, now holding the national medieval collection.

The Convent of St Agnes holds the National Gallery's medieval art: altarpieces, panel paintings and carved saints from Bohemia and central Europe, shown in the rooms of a thirteenth-century Poor Clare house. Downstairs the two brick churches and the cloister are left bare, cool and usually empty, so you cross from a full gallery into empty rooms inside one building. A garden with modern sculpture runs down towards the river wall. Agnes, who founded all of it in 1231, was a king's daughter who refused the marriages arranged for her. One of the matches she refused was an emperor. Agnes took the Poor Clare habit instead and built this house with her brother, King Wenceslas I, then ran it for decades. What you walk through now is a rescue. The buildings were restored between about 1900 and 1914, and the National Gallery brought the medieval collection here in 1963. That decision is why the rooms work: the altarpieces upstairs were painted for churches like the two downstairs, and here they hang inside one. Go down afterwards and stand in the bare brick nave, and you can see what they were made to be seen against.

Worth knowing

Good to know

This is the quiet one — It sits ten minutes from the Old Town Square and takes a fraction of the visitors, so you can often stand alone in a room of fourteenth-century panels.
Go down into the churches before you go up to the paintings — They are brick, tall and stripped of furnishing, which is the closest you get in Prague to what a thirteenth-century interior actually felt like.
Sit in the cloister for a few minutes — It runs round a small garth with grass and nothing else, and the noise of the city drops away almost completely once you are inside the walls.
The garden is a separate pleasure and needs no ticket — It runs from the convent wall down towards the river with sculpture set in the grass, and it stays open when the galleries are closed.

Things to do

1
Stand in the empty church and listen
Go into the larger of the two brick churches and stop in the middle. There is no furniture, no altarpiece and no glass to speak of, so what you get is the shape of the room and its echo. Speak once and count how long the sound takes to die. That is the acoustic the nuns sang into.
2
Find an altarpiece that was cut apart
In the galleries above, look for panels shown singly rather than in a frame. Many were sawn out of larger altarpieces when churches were cleared. Look along the edges for the cut, then imagine the missing wings. Half the medieval painting in this country survives as fragments like these.
3
Walk the garden down to the river wall
Leave the buildings and take the garden path towards the water. Modern sculpture stands in the grass, the convent wall is on one side and the embankment on the other. It is the one place here where the medieval complex and the present-day city are in the same view.