User:Jan.Kamenicek/my sandbox

en:Category:User cs-N Marian and Holy Trinity Columns

Marian columns were built in honour to the Virgin Mary, often in thanksgiving for ending a plague or some other help. The purpose of the Holy Trinity columns was usually to celebrate the church and the faith. However, the plague motif could sometimes play its role as well. Building these religious monuments flourished especially in the 17th and 18th centuries and thus they became one of the most visible features of Baroque architecture.

Some other saints also occur on the plague columns. A typical one is St. Roch, who is said to get ill when helping the sick during an epidemic of plague and recover. St. Sebastian, a martyr whose statues also often decorate these structures, was originally the patron of archers. In the Middle Ages people sometimes metaphorically compared the random nature of plague to random shots of archers and thus he started being connected with the plague too. Other frequently depicted saints are St. Barbara, a patron of the dying, St. Francis Xavier, who was, according to the legend, raising people from the dead, and St. Charles Borromeo, known for working among the sick and the dying.

Erecting columns with a statue of the Virgin Mary dates back at least to the 10th century (in Clermont-Ferrand in France), but it became common especially in the Counter-Reformation period following the Council of Trident (1545 - 1563). The column on Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome was one of the first. It originally supported the vault of Bazilica of Constantine in Rome[1], destroyed by an earthquake in the 9th century. Only this column survived and in 1614 it was transported to Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore and crowned with a bronze statue of the Virgin with the Child. Later it served as a model for many following columns in Italy and other European countries.

The first column of this type north of the Alps was the Mariensäule built in Munich in 1638 to celebrate that the city was spared by both invading Swedish army and the plague. It inspired for example Marian columns in Prague and Vienna, but many others also followed very quickly. In the countries which used to belong to the Habsburg Monarchy (especially the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary) it is quite exceptional to find an old square without such a column, usually located on the most prominent place.

The Prague column was built shortly after the Thirty Years’ War in thanksgiving to the Virgin Mary Immaculate for helping in the fight with the Swedes. At noon its shadow indicated the so-called Prague Meridian, which was used to check exact time.Unfortunately, later many Czechs connected its building with the victory of the Habsburgs in their country and after declaring the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918 some vandals pulled this old monument down and destroyed it in revolutionary enthusiasm.

The basic model which inspired building most Holy Trinity columns is on the Graben Square in Vienna, built after the 1679 plague. The era of these religious structures culminated with the outstanding Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc. This monument, built shortly after the plague which struck Moravia (nowadays in the Czech Republic) between 1714 and 1716 was exceptional because of its monumentality, rich decoration and unusual combination of sculptural material (stone and gilded copper). Its base was made so big that even a chapel was hidden inside. This column is the only one which has been individually inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "one of the most exceptional examples of the apogee of central European Baroque artistic expression".[2] .