Twelve famous statues stand in Rome, Florence and Paris, from Michelangelo's David to the Venus de Milo, and few of them are still on the spot they were made for.
Weather, floods and politics moved them indoors, across a sea or onto a new base. In several squares, the figure people photograph today is a copy.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
A sculptor always works for a precise spot, a square, a doorway, a fountain or a palace. He decides how high the figure will stand and which side people will see first, and those choices count as much as the pose.
Move the statue, and the work changes with it. A back meant to face a wall turns toward the crowd, and an arm found centuries later can alter a whole gesture.
The list counts down and visits three cities in turn: four statues in Paris, then four in Florence, then four in Rome. Each was chosen because the place where it stands today, and the road that led there, is part of its story.
12. Paris: Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais (1884 to 1895)
The list opens in Paris, with six bronze men who walk barefoot, ropes around their necks, almost at the level of the visitors around them. They are The Burghers of Calais, by Auguste Rodin, and the low base under their feet is the end of a long quarrel.
The six were real men. In 1347 Calais, a French port facing England across the Channel, surrendered to the English king Edward III after about a year of siege.
A writer of the time, the chronicler Jean Froissart, recorded what the king demanded: six leading citizens, barefoot, with ropes around their necks and the keys of the town. The queen of England begged for their lives, and they were spared.
More than five centuries later, in September 1884, the mayor of Calais, Omer Dewavrin, proposed a monument to the six. It was paid for by a national subscription, money collected from the public across France, and Rodin received the commission.
A monument of that time usually set one hero high above the crowd. Rodin gave the six men the same height, with no leader raised above the others.
That choice raised a new question: how high should a group with no hero stand? In 1893 Rodin proposed setting it almost at ground level, right on the paving stones of the square.
He wanted the six to follow one another on the pavement like the beads of a rosary, a living chain of suffering and sacrifice. Calais did not follow him. On June 3, 1895, the town unveiled the bronze on a compromise pedestal, well above the street.
That pedestal did not have the last word. The monument moved in 1924 and again later, and in Calais today it stands in front of the town hall on a much lower base, closer to what Rodin wanted.
The group in Paris is another cast of the same work. A bronze statue is cast, which means molten metal is poured into a mold taken from the sculptor's model, so one model can give several bronzes.
The Paris bronze was cast in 1926, nine years after Rodin's death, and it sits in the garden of the museum devoted to him, only a little above the ground.
At a Glance
Artist: Auguste Rodin (1840 to 1917)
Made: Commissioned 1884, unveiled in Calais 1895, this cast made 1926
Medium: Bronze
Size: 217 x 255 x 197 cm (85 x 100 x 78 in)
Where to see it: Musée Rodin, Paris, in the sculpture garden
11. Paris: Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (1880 to 1904)
In the same garden, a naked man sits on a rock, bent forward, his chin resting on the back of his right hand. This is The Thinker, the best known of all the figures Rodin made.
It began small. In 1880 Rodin modeled it as a statuette called The Poet, meant to sit at the top of The Gates of Hell, a huge door inspired by the Inferno, the poem in which the Italian poet Dante visits Hell.
The Poet was supposed to stay up there, small and far above the heads of visitors. Instead the figure grew to more than life size, and its first public test, outside one of the great monuments of Paris, ended with an attack.