Here on the stone railing, look for a tall sandstone pseudo-Gothic base supporting a sculpture of Saint Joseph gently leading a young Jesus by the hand. As we saw at our last stop with the Pietà, art often gets caught in the crossfire of history.
The sculpture you see today is an eighteen fifty-four replacement. For nearly a century and a half, a grand Baroque masterpiece stood right here, sculpted in seventeen-o-six by the renowned Jan Brokoff. But then came the eighteen forty-eight Uprisings. As nationalist forces clashed with the Austrian Empire, the Charles Bridge became a literal battlefield. Cannon fire ripped across the river, and the original Saint Joseph took a direct, devastating hit. The damage was so catastrophic, the statue could not be saved.
If you pull up the photo in your app, you can see the surviving pieces of that original Baroque sculpture, which now rest in a local museum, bearing the scars of the city's turbulent past.
But a destroyed monument is rarely the end of the story. A local tradesman stepped up to fund a new version by sculptor Josef Max. Take a glance at the next image on your screen. Max kept the tender motif of Joseph and Jesus but placed them on that uniquely tall pedestal, a style meant to modernize the bridge. It is fitting that Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, stands as a testament to the fact that whatever history tears down, skilled hands will build back up.
Let us keep walking along this bridge, which remains open twenty-four hours a day all week, to meet the protective matriarch of the bridge, Saint Anne.
