The Plague Column on the Graben is a scene rather than a monument. Leopold I kneels near the bottom in prayer, and above him Paul Strudel carved Faith driving an old woman, the plague itself, off the edge into nothing. The whole thing stands twenty-one metres, twenty centimetres taller than the high altar of St Stephen's, and the clouds are cut deeply enough to throw their own shadows.
In flat midday sun the forms merge into a pale mass; come late in the afternoon and they separate, and the figures step forward. Leopold vowed the monument during the plague of 1679, and the first version raised here, a year later, was made of wood. Turning that into stone took another thirteen years and three pairs of hands, and the finished column was consecrated in October 1693. A sculptor began the marble, an architect reworked the base and its reliefs, and the court theatre designer supplied the cloud shape.