Marian and Holy Trinity columns

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.

[citation needed] The Christian practice of erecting a column topped with a statue of the Virgin Mary became common especially in the Counter-Reformation period following the Council of Trent (1545–1563).

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 made by Domenico Ferri.

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".

[citation needed] The first column of this type north of the Alps was the Mariensäule built in Munich in 1638 to celebrate the sparing of the city from both the invading Swedish army and the plague.

In the countries which used to belong to the Habsburg monarchy (especially Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) it is quite exceptional to find an old town square without such a column, usually located in the most prominent place.

[citation needed] The Prague column was built in Old Town Square shortly after the Thirty Years' War in thanksgiving to the Virgin Mary Immaculate for helping in the fight with the Swedes.

Some Czechs 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.

[7] The Column of the Virgin Mary Immaculate in Kutná Hora was constructed by the Jesuit sculptor František Baugut between 1713 and 1715 to commemorate the recent plague.