Our Lady in Nuremberg, All Saints Chapel in Prague, and the High Choir of Prague Cathedral

The high choir of Prague Cathedral - the triforium, clerestory and high vault -, is usually extolled for the ingenuity and originality of its decorative forms. But it also reflects certain general attitudes or approaches to architectural design: a close correspondence between external and internal forms; a handling of wall planes in terms of layering and recession; and a conscious contrast between a relatively simple and robust arcade storey and delicate, intricately fashioned upper levels. This paper argues that such general approaches to design are prefigured (or paralleled) in two buildings founded by Emperor Charles IV, and associated with or designed by Peter Parler: the now much-damaged chapel of All Saints in Prague Castle and the Westwerk of the church of Our Lady in Nuremburg. While the creative relationship between the Prague chapel and the cathedral is difficult to disentangle (both were under construction in the 1370s), the Nuremberg church, particularly its western upper chapel of St Michael dating to the mid-1350s, anticipates much of Peter Parler's thinking in Prague twenty years later. Both buildings also shared a common function, for they belonged to an elite group of colleges of priests (mansionaries) founded by Charles IV in honour of the Virgin Mary. The most senior of these institutions served as an imperial chantry at the very centre of the choir of Prague Cathedral - a fact that may have led Parler to look at Our Lady in Nuremberg as an appropriate source of inspiration for the architectural setting of the mansionaries' college in Prague.