The National Museum, Prague

The National Museum occupies a neo-Renaissance pile designed by Josef Schulz and opened in 1891, shut for years of rebuilding and reopened in 2018. What you get is two museums joined by an underground passage: the historic building, where the architecture is half the exhibit, and the plainer New Building next door used for temporary shows. Inside the old wing a marble staircase climbs under a painted dome to the Pantheon, a hall of busts and statues of Czech writers, scientists and composers. The permanent displays are natural history and prehistory: long runs of minerals, mounted animals, fossils and bone, arranged in the old cabinet manner rather than as a modern interactive museum.

History

The museum's roots go back to 1796, when Count Sternberg and other nobles founded the Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts, and it was founded on 15 April 1818 by Kašpar Maria Šternberg, with the historian František Palacký closely involved. Its early focus was natural science, partly because Šternberg was a botanist, mineralogist and palaeobotanist; it began acquiring historical objects only in the 1830s and 1840s, when Palacký, as its historian and secretary, tried to balance the two fields, and in 1827 he had suggested that it publish separate journals in German and Czech, of which the Czech one ran for more than a century. The collections moved from the Sternberg Palace to the Nostitz Palace and then to the neo-Renaissance building on Wenceslas Square, completed in 1891. In 1964 the museum was organised into five autonomous parts, among them the Náprstek Museum and the museum library, a Museum of Czech Music was added in 1976, and the main building was restored from 2011 to 2018 (Wikipedia, National Museum (Prague)).

What's there

• The Pantheon - the domed hall of busts and statues under painted lunettes.
• The marble staircase - the grand climb that most visitors photograph before they see anything else.
• The mineral collection - hundreds of Czech and world specimens in original wooden vitrines.
• The dome gallery - the upper level, when open, looking down the length of the square.

When to go

Open year round and the obvious choice on a wet or cold day, which is exactly when it is fullest. Weekday mornings are calmest; Czech school groups take over the natural history halls by late morning. Check which temporary exhibition is running in the New Building before paying for a combined ticket, since the two halves are priced separately.

Good to know

The rebuilding restored the shell beautifully but the permanent displays feel old-fashioned: rows of cases, brief labels and thin English on the smaller items. Some visitors leave with the sense that they paid mainly to see a staircase. Sections close for reinstallation without much notice, and access to the dome is a separate ticket with its own queue.

Nearby

The New Building next door and the streets of the New Town below the square.

Key facts