Saint Jude, Baroque statue on Charles Bridge, Czech Republic.
The statue of Jude the Apostle is an outdoor sculpture by Jan Oldřich Mayer on the north side of the Charles Bridge in Prague. The figure holds a club in his right hand and a medallion with the face of Jesus in his left.
The sculpture was created in 1708 by artist Jan Oldřich Mayer and financed by a local knight, František Sezima Mitrovský of Nemyšl. This period marked a time when Prague was embracing Baroque artistic traditions and adding religious figures to public spaces.
Jude the Apostle is invoked as the patron of hopeless and desperate cases, so his statue draws people who leave prayers or touch the base. The figure is one of the thirty statues on the bridge, and its position on the north side places it in the stream of pedestrians crossing between the Old Town and Malá Strana.
The statue stands on the north side of Charles Bridge, on the bridge's pedestrian deck, so it is reached only on foot; no vehicles cross the bridge. The bridge surface is paved with uneven stone blocks, and there are no ramps to the sculpture.
The knotted club held by the figure symbolizes a tool of early Christian martyrdom and connects the work to stories from the first century. This detail links the sculpture to history stretching far beyond its own creation period.
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