Sculpture of St. Cyril and St. Methodius

The sculpture of St. Cyril and St. Methodius was created between 1928 and 1938 by sculptor Karel Dvořák using Boháň sandstone. On Charles Bridge, it replaced an older sculpture of St. Ignatius, a work by Ferdinand Maximillian Brokoff, which collapsed into Vltava during the 1890 flood (fragments of the sculpture are on display in the Lapidarium of the National Museum). Dvořák’s sculpture was funded by the Ministry of Education of Czechoslovakia, upon the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state.

The basic concept of the sculpture responds to the compositional style of older Baroque statues. The Thessalonian brothers Cyril and Methodius are depicted in a hierarchical pyramidal composition as evangelists preaching to the Moravian people, represented here by a girl and a pair of young men. Cyril, standing higher up, holds his right hand raised in a gesture of blessing. Below him, Methodius has his hands covered by a cloth, and holds a model of a rotunda, resting on a large book.

The sculpture is the most recent original work installed on Charles Bridge. Its restoration was completed in the summer of 2021, during which the sculpture was thoroughly cleaned and a linden branch, the missing attribute of the Slavic girl, was added.