Amadeus | Strahov Library — books stacked to the ceiling while a genius starves

Baron van Swieten talks about patronage and pupils among walnut shelves that climb two storeys, and the room says everything the dialogue does not: this is where money and learning sit, and Mozart is outside it.

Forman used the Strahov Monastery Library above Malá Strana. The Premonstratensians have kept books on this hill since 1143, and the two halls the film moves through were finished around Mozart's own lifetime. The Theological Hall of 1679 is low and white-stuccoed, with astronomical globes down the middle. The Philosophical Hall, built in the 1780s to take a library bought wholesale from a dissolved Moravian monastery, is the tall one — walnut cases to the ceiling and Anton Maulbertsch's vast fresco of the spiritual history of mankind painted overhead in six months. Together they hold something like 200,000 volumes.

The library is open daily and ticketed. Visitors normally view the halls from the doorways rather than walking through them, which turns out to be the film's own angle: you look in at the knowledge from the threshold.

Buy the ticket that adds the cabinet of curiosities on the connecting corridor — dried sea creatures, a narwhal tusk, a pair of whale phalluses catalogued with complete seriousness. Then step back to the Philosophical Hall door and look up until your neck aches. That is the shot.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-licensed interior view of the Strahov Library, Prague.