Shortly after the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis, a little-known devotion to Our Lady attracted worldwide publicity: Mary as Undoer of Knots. The devotion, a favourite of the Pope, can be traced to a Baroque painting of the Virgin attributed to Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner (1625-1707) and found in the St Peter am Perlach Church in Augsburg, Bavaria, in which Mary is depicted as untying a long, knotted rope which she holds in her hands. While Bergoglio was studying in Germany, he was very struck by the image and brought a postcard of the painting home to Argentina where he subsequently enthusiastically promoted the devotion, crediting it with helping him through a personal crisis in his own life.