The Most Famous Statues in the World
The most famous statues in the world are public monuments before they are artworks: the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, Christ the Redeemer, the Moai. People travel to stand in front of them. Here is what each one hides, including the truth about the Sphinx and Napoleon.
1 | David, Michelangelo (1504, Florence)
Carved from a block of marble other sculptors had abandoned for 40 years. Florence called the block the Giant. Michelangelo was 26 when he took it.
Moving the finished statue took 40 men four days for less than a kilometer. The pose, weight on one leg, is the textbook case of contrapposto. Where it stands today and why there are two Davids in Florence is in where is the statue of David.
The statue also sat at the center of a public feud between two giants. I tell that war in Leonardo vs Michelangelo.
2 | The Great Sphinx of Giza (about 2500 BC)
The oldest colossal statue on earth, and the most slandered. The story goes that Napoleon’s soldiers shot off the nose with a cannon in 1798.
Drawings made in 1737, decades before Napoleon arrived, already show the Sphinx without a nose. A medieval historian, al Maqrizi, blamed a Sufi zealot who defaced it in 1378. The French were innocent, for once.
3 | The Motherland Calls (1967, Volgograd)
An 85 metre concrete woman with a raised sword stands over the battlefield of Stalingrad, the tallest statue in the world when it was built.
She is unanchored, held down by her own weight, and engineers monitor her tilt constantly. Nothing about her is subtle, which was the commission.
4 | The Statue of Liberty (1886, New York)
Her copper skin is about as thick as two pennies, hung on an iron skeleton engineered by Gustave Eiffel before his tower existed.
She was brown when she arrived. The green patina crept over her in about 20 years, and when the government proposed repainting her, the public refused. To raise funds, her severed arm and torch had toured America first, standing in a Philadelphia park in 1876.
5 | The Pieta, Michelangelo (1499, Vatican)
The only work Michelangelo ever signed. After overhearing visitors credit another sculptor, he came back at night and cut his name into the sash across Mary’s chest.
In 1972 a man attacked it with a hammer, shouting that he was Jesus Christ, and shattered Mary’s arm and face. It sits behind bulletproof glass now. The whole tradition of the grieving Virgin is in what is a Pieta.
6 | The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904 monumental cast)
He was never meant to think alone. Rodin designed him as a small figure of Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, a bronze door commissioned in 1880.
There is no single original: more than 25 authorized casts exist worldwide, which is why Paris, Philadelphia and Tokyo can all claim him at once.
7 | The Winged Victory of Samothrace (about 190 BC, Louvre)
Found in 1863 on a Greek island, in more than a hundred fragments. She was reassembled piece by piece at the top of the Louvre’s grandest staircase.
Her right hand turned up almost a century later, in 1950, and is displayed in a case beside her. The head has never been found.
8 | The Little Mermaid and the small monuments
Fame has nothing to do with scale. Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid is 125 centimetres tall and draws over a million visitors a year.
Brussels answers with Manneken Pis at 55 centimetres, dressed in a wardrobe of more than a thousand costumes. Both have been stolen or beheaded repeatedly.
9 | The Moai of Easter Island (1250 to 1500)
The famous heads have bodies. Centuries of sediment buried the torsos, some of them seven meters deep, and excavations keep revealing carved backs and hands.
How did islanders move statues weighing up to 80 tons? The leading theory, tested with replicas, is that teams rocked them forward upright with ropes, the way you walk a refrigerator.
10 | Mount Rushmore (1941, South Dakota)
Four presidents carved 18 metres high into a granite ridge, using dynamite for around 90 percent of the removal work.
The mountain is in the Black Hills, land guaranteed to the Lakota by treaty in 1868 and taken back after gold was found. The sculpture and the dispute are inseparable.
11 | Christ the Redeemer (1931, Rio de Janeiro)
The face and hands were shaped in France, shipped across the Atlantic, and the whole figure was clad in thousands of soapstone triangles.
The women who glued the tiles wrote the names of loved ones and wishes on the backs. The statue takes several lightning strikes a year, and in 2014 a bolt broke a fingertip.
12 | The Little Mermaid (1913, Copenhagen)
The most attacked statue in the world. Beheaded in 1964 and again in 1998, an arm sawn off in 1984, blasted off her rock with explosives in 2003, and regularly drenched in paint.
The head from 1964 was never recovered. Copenhagen keeps recasting her from the original mold, which the sculptor’s family still controls.
Where to stand in front of them
Paris alone holds three: the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory and a Thinker at the Musee Rodin. Florence has David at the Accademia, the Vatican has the Pieta and the Laocoon.
If you want the painted version of these stories, my list of the greatest sculptures that shaped art history digs into nine more.
If you want to keep looking, the Met’s sculpture collection and the Rijksmuseum both put large parts of their holdings online.
Before you queue: what people ask
Which one would I put first? By visitor numbers and recognition, David and the Statue of Liberty trade the crown, with the Sphinx as the ancient champion.
Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx? No. Drawings from 1737 show it already noseless, and a medieval source blames a Sufi zealot in 1378.
Why does the Pieta sit behind glass? A hammer attack in 1972 shattered Mary’s arm and face. The glass has protected it since.
Are the Easter Island heads just heads? No, they have full bodies buried under centuries of sediment, some seven meters deep.
Which city has the most statues on this list? Paris, with the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory and The Thinker.
One number to leave with: when the Terracotta Army was found in 1974, the farmers who hit the first clay head were paid about 10 yuan. The site now draws millions of visitors a year.