Plague Column

Information about Plague Column

The plague Column of the Virgin Mary Immaculate in KutnÃ¡ Hora, the Czech Republic, built between 1713 and 1715.

Marian columns are religious monuments built in honour of the Virgin Mary, often in thanksgiving for ending a plague or for some other help. The purpose of the Holy Trinity columns was usually simply to celebrate the church and the faith. However, the plague motif could sometimes play its role in their erection as well. Erecting religious monuments in the form of a column surmounted by a figure or a Christian symbol was a gesture of public faith that flourished in the Catholic countries of Europe especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus they became one of the most visible features of Baroque architecture.

Some other saints are also depicted on the plague columns. A typical one is St. Roch, who is said to have fallen ill when helping the sick during an epidemic of plague and who recovered through the strength of his faith. St. Sebastian, a martyr whose statue also often decorates these structures, was originally the patron of archers. In the Middle Ages Sebastian took the place of the plague-dealing archer Apollo, as 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, and two more recent and historical saints: St. Francis Xavier, who, according to the legend, raised people from the dead, and St. Charles Borromeo, known for working among the sick and the dying.

The Marian column in front of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

In Imperial Rome, it was the practice to erect a statue of the Emperor atop a column. The last such a column was the Column of Phocas, erected in the Roman Forum and dedicated or rededicated in 608. The Christian practice of erecting a column topped 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 Trent (1545 – 1563). The column in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome was one of the first. The column itself was ancient: it had supported the vault of the so-called Basilica of Constantine in Rome [1], destroyed by an earthquake in the 9th century. By the 17th century only this column survived; in 1614 it was transported to Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore and crowned with a bronze statue of the Virgin and Child. Within decades it served as a model for many columns in Italy and other European countries.

The first column of this type north of the Alps was the MariensÃ¤ule built in Munich in 1638 to celebrate the sparing of the city from both the invading Swedish army and the plague. The Virgin Mary is standing on its top on a crescent moon as the Queen of Heaven. 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 town square without such a column, usually located on the most prominent place.

Destroyed Marian Column in Prague.

The Prague column was built in Old Town Square (StaroměstskÃ© nÃ¡městÃ) 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 the exact solar time. Unfortunately, many Czechs later connected its placement and erection with the hegemony of the Habsburgs in their country, and after declaring the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918 a crowd of people pulled this old monument down and destroyed it in an excess of revolutionary fervor.

Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc.

The basic model which inspired building most Holy Trinity columns is the PestsÃ¤ule or DreifaltigkeitssÃ¤ule ("Plague or Holy Trinity column") in the Grabenplatz, Vienna, built after the 1679 plague; in this monument the column has entirely disappeared in marble clouds and colossal saints, angels and putti. The era of these religious structures culminated with the outstanding Holy Trinity Column in Upper Square (HornÃ nÃ¡městÃ) 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]

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Mary (Judeo-Aramaic: מרים, Maryām, from Hebrew Miriam), called since medieval times Madonna (My Lady), resident in Nazareth in Galilee, is known from the New Testament^[1]
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Bubonic Plague
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Yersinia pestis'' seen at 2000x magnification with a fluorescent label. This bacterium, carried and spread by fleas, is the cause of the various forms of the disease plague.
ICD-10 A 20.
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religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience.
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A column in architecture and structural engineering is a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below.
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Europe is one of the seven traditional continents of the Earth. Physically and geologically, Europe is the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, west of Asia. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Sea,
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As a means of recording the passage of time, the 17th Century was that century which lasted from 1601-1700 in the Gregorian calendar.

The 17th Century falls into the Early Modern period of Europe and was characterized by the Baroque cultural movement and the beginning of
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The 18th Century lasted from 1701 through 1800 in the Gregorian calendar.

Historians sometimes specifically define the 18th Century otherwise for the purposes of their work.
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For the Baroque style in a more general sense, see Baroque.

Baroque architecture, starting in the early 17th century in Italy, took the humanist Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical, theatrical, sculptural fashion,
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saint is one who is sanctified (cf. 2 Chron. 6:41). The early Christians were all called saints. (Heb. 13:24; Jud. 1:3; Phile. 1:5, 7) Over time, the traditional usage of the term saint
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St. Roch was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police schooner, the first ship to completely circumnavigate North America, and the second sailing vessel to complete a voyage through the Northwest Passage.
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SebastiAn (born Sebastian AkchotÃ©) is a French electro artist who came to prominence with his first releases on Ed Banger Records in 2005 entitled 'Smoking Kills(?)' & 'H.A.L.'.
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Archery is the practice of using a bow to shoot arrows. Archery has historically been used in hunting and combat and has become a precision sport. A person practicing archery is called an archer, and one who is fond of or an expert at archery is sometimes called a
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Middle Ages form the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three "ages": the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times.
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In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo (in Greek, Ἀπόλλων — ApÃ³llōn or Ἀπέλλων — Apellōn), the ideal of the kouros
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Saint Barbara, known as the Great Martyr Barbara in the Orthodox church, was a Christian saint and martyr, who lived in the third century.

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The hagiography of Saint Barbara says that she was born about 300 A.D. in Nicomedia, Bithynia in Asia Minor.
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Francis Xavier (Basque: San Frantzisko Xabierkoa; Spanish: San Francisco Javier; Portuguese: SÃ£o Francisco Xavier; Chinese: 聖方濟各沙勿略) (7 April, 1506 - 2 December, 1552) was a Spanish pioneering Roman Catholic Christian missionary and
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Saint Charles Borromeo (Italian: Carlo Borromeo; Latinized as Carolus Borromeus) (October 2, 1538 – November 3, 1584) was an Italian saint and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Roman Empire is the name given to both the imperial domain developed by the city-state of Rome and also the corresponding phase of that civilization, characterized by an autocratic form of government. This article however is about the latter.
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Column of Phocas, which was erected before the Rostra in the Roman Forum and dedicated or rededicated in honour of the Byzantine emperor Phocas on August 1 608, was the last addition made to the Roman Forum. The fluted Corinthian column stands 13.
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Roman Forum: Temple of Vespasian on the left, Arch of Septimius Severus behind the remains of the Temple of Saturn in the foreground. On the right are the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Palatine Hill, and slightly to the left of these is the Chiesa di San
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The Counter-Reformation (also Catholic Reformation^[1]^[1] or Catholic Revival^[1]) denotes the period of Catholic revival from the pontificate of Pope Pius IV in 1560 to the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648.
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The Council of Trent was the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church. It was convened three times between December 13, 1545 and December 4, 1563 in the city of Trent (modern Trento, Trentino) as a response to the theological and ecclesiological challenges of the
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Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore — also known as the Basilica di Santa Maria della Neve and Basilica Liberiana in the Italian language and Saint Mary Major Basilica or the Liberian Basilica
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Comune di Roma

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Nickname: "The Eternal City"
Motto: "Senatus Populusque Romanus" (SPQR) (Latin)
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