The actual likeness of Jan Hus is unknown, which is why artists often drew on medieval illuminations of the Martinice Bible (1430) and the Jena Codex (1506). However, with
the revival of the cult of Hus in the 19th cen-tury, the way of depicting the reform preacher
as a tall, slender man with a beard changed significantly. This is also how Ladislav Šaloun (1870–1946) depicted him in his Art Nouveau monument. It was installed on Old Town Square in Prague in 1915. The same image of Hus appears on a monumental historical canvas by Václav Brožík from 1883, which depicts the priest in front of the Council of Constance.
The academic sculptor František Fabiánek (1884–1967) was a figure painter and excelled in expressing the emotional expression of the face. He trained as a stonemason in Boskovice. After successfully passing the final exams at the stonemasonry school in Hořice, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Pra-gue under Josef Václav Myslbek in 1905–1910. In 1910 he stayed in the Paris studio of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Subsequently, he worked in Brno, where he lived and created four bronze reliefs of the Holy Evangelists for
the Church of St. Augustine, which were subsequently placed in the pulpit of that church. Fa-biánek stayed in Hradec Králové from 1911 to 1914, during which time he worked on the bust of Dr. Klumpar and on figures and decorative details enlivening the façades of local private and public buildings. Among his sculptural works in architecture, for example, the reliefs of three telamons under the roof of the Credit Union from 1910–1911 (today’s seat of the Gallery of Modern Art Hradec Králové) by Osvald Polívka (1859-1931) have survived. Throughout his work, he focused mainly on portraits, sculptures and monuments.
The bust of Jan Hus on a tall prismatic pylon is said to have stood in the garden of Dr. Klumpar’s villa in the same street a few meters away. In 1912, when the building of
the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren by Oldřich Liska was inaugurated, the relocated bust was unveiled. Fabiánek captured the Czech reformer in his last moments with his lean, emaciated bearded head, whose expression was meant to convey Hus’s suffering. Behind his left shoulder looms what appears to be a charred piece of wood from the funeral pyre at
Constance. The motif of the border also appears on the Zbraslav monument by the academic sculptor Josef Fran-tišek Žák from 1934. František Bílek also depicted the priest in fear and suffering in his monument, which was erected in Kolín in 1941.
There is another identical monument in Hradec Králové, a later replica of the author’s, in Sukovy sady (former-ly Fialovy sady) Park.
JFB
