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 mind and the purity of style with which, even in this kind of work, he was able to clothe his idea. In the interior, his mastery in the art of arranging spaces and observing proportion is amply evident: the vestibule, the staircases, the corridors and the auditorium form a disciplined, lucid and practical whole, the foyer and the rooms adjoining the auditorium are flawless in their consistency with the rest. In the teeth of determined opposition, he succeeded in obtaining a hard material, the stone that he needed, and he enhanced the brilliance of the interior by the use of varied marbles, of stucco, gilding, ornaments in colour and frescoes. The preceding chapters have set forth how he was aided in this task by the new generation of painters and sculptors.

An architect of the purest Semperian type, handling the historic forms with sovereign mastery, Zítek none the less remained faithful to his own artistic instincts. This rich and spontaneous creative impulse was lacking, however, in his disciples, even in the best of them, his collaborator Josef Schulz, the architect of the two largest museums in Prague, the  and that of the Decorative Arts. He began by a sort of collaboration with Zítek, when after the National Theatre fire he was commissioned to renovate the interior, destroyed by the fire, and to link up the offices of the management with the main building. Together with Zítek, too, he was employed on another great construction in Prague, that of the Rudolphinum (at present the provisional seat of the National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Republic). The two-fold object of this building—a concert hall and a picture gallery—is represented externally by the different design and arrangement of the two blocks. But this bipartite construction, despite the brilliance of the interior and the splendour of the façades, is not a harmonious work. The Rudolphinum of Prague, it has been written, “is a junction for new and heterogeneous ideas; it stands at