Our Lady Victorious on Silesian Marian columns – origins of the presentation.

Among Silesian Baroque free-standing Marian monuments the presentations with Mary trampling a serpent which is entwining the globe, and the carried by her Infant Jesus piercing the serpent’s head with a cross arm long as a spear, draw a special attention. It is a motif of so called Victorious God’s Mother. It appears in Silesia very rarely and relatively late: in Duszniki (1725), Otmuchów (1734), Jawiszów (1741) and in the Wrocław district of Leśnica (1743). This type of presentation started to function in art most certainly following Pope Alexander VII’s bull of 1661, which legitimised the cult of the Immaculate Conception. A particular and exceptional kind of an image of Mary Immaculate, which referred evidently to Counter-Reformation presentations of Archangel Michael defeating the dragon, was created by a painter Carlo Maratta. In 1663 the artist painted an altar picture for the Our Lady Immaculate Conception chapel in St. Isidore Church of Irish Franciscan Friars in Rome. The small chapel was designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini and erected in the years 1661–1663 from the initiative of Alfonso Manzanedo de Quinõnes as a grave chapel of Portuguese noblemen Roderigo Lopez da Sylva and his wife Beatriz and Francesco Nicolò da Sylva, and his wife Juana. Taking the outstanding authors of the chapel decoration into consideration and thanks to Maratta’s own copperplate version of the painting of Our Lady Victorious, executed in 1665, this image was often copied throughout the whole period of Baroque