45 Fun Facts About Sculpture

Which sculptor is renowned for creating 'The Thinker'?

Auguste Rodin first called the figure The Poet and conceived it in 1880, about 70 cm tall, to crown a doorway commission; the monumental bronze the world knows was cast only in 1904.

The marble block for Florence's famous Renaissance David was quarried near which Tuscan town?

Carrara's quarries supplied the block in the 1460s; an earlier sculptor barely roughed it out, and it lay neglected in the cathedral workshop yard for decades before work began again in 1501.

Anish Kapoor's mirror-polished Cloud Gate, nicknamed 'The Bean', reflects the skyline of which American city's Millennium Park?

Chicago's 'Bean' was inspired by liquid mercury; visitors can walk under its 12-foot arch and see themselves stretched and warped in the mirrored underside.

The Great Sphinx of Giza, a reclining lion with a human head, was carved from a single piece of which stone?

Limestone bedrock was carved where it lay; drifting sand later buried the Sphinx to its shoulders, and a prince who cleared it away, the future Thutmose IV, said the statue had promised him the throne in a dream.

The monumental 'Christ the Redeemer' statue overlooks which Brazilian city?

Rio de Janeiro's statue stands on the summit of Corcovado, where lightning strikes it often; a bolt in January 2014 chipped a piece off its right hand.

In the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, the Trojan priest and his two boys are being attacked by what?

Sea serpents were sent, in the best-known telling, to silence the priest after he warned Troy against the wooden horse; the marble was unearthed in Rome in 1506 and bought at once by Pope Julius II.

In sculpture, what is a stele?

A single standing stone slab bearing an inscription or carving, the stele served as monument and marker; the Rosetta Stone is a fragment of one, and its three scripts unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The giant stone figures called moai stand on which remote Pacific island?

Easter Island's moai came from one main quarry, where many still sit unfinished; hundreds of others were moved from there to stone platforms around the island's shore.

London's Elgin Marbles were removed in the early 1800s from which ancient temple?

The Parthenon in Athens lost about half its surviving sculptures to Lord Elgin's agents; one shipload sank in a storm off southern Greece and took two years to raise from the seabed.

Terracotta sculpture, made since ancient times, is produced by firing which material?

Clay baked at a fairly low heat becomes terracotta, Italian for 'baked earth'; because it is shaped largely with the fingers and costs little, sculptors could work in it far more freely than in stone.

Which Renaissance sculptor made the bronze 'David' thought to be the first free-standing nude statue since antiquity?

Donatello shows the giant-killer not as a mighty warrior but as a slight boy in nothing but boots and a laurel-wreathed hat, his foot resting on Goliath's severed head.

Who carved the marble Pietà that stands in St Peter's Basilica in Rome?

Michelangelo carved it in his early twenties and, Vasari tells, cut his name across Mary's sash after hearing visitors credit the work to another sculptor; he never signed anything again.

Which British sculptor is known for monumental reclining figures pierced with holes?

Henry Moore traced his reclining figures to an ancient Mexican chacmool figure he saw as a plaster cast in a Paris museum, later calling it the most important influence on his early work.

The 'Venus de Milo' is generally thought to depict which Greek goddess?

Aphrodite is the usual reading, but without her arms and whatever they held nobody can be sure: some scholars have argued she is the sea goddess Amphitrite.

Who found China's Terracotta Army in 1974?

Well diggers, farmers outside Xi'an, struck a life-size soldier; excavation has since revealed thousands more, buried to guard the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

Which pioneer of modern abstract sculpture made the 'Bird in Space' series?

Constantin Brâncuși shipped a Bird in Space to New York in 1926, where customs officers refused to accept it as art and taxed it as a manufactured metal object; a court ruled in his favour in 1928.

What art movement is Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain', a porcelain urinal signed 'R. Mutt', associated with?

Dadaism relished the stunt: Duchamp took a factory-made urinal, signed it with a false name and sent it to a New York exhibition whose organisers refused to put it on show.

Which British artist created 'Angel of the North', a large public sculpture in Gateshead?

Antony Gormley modelled the Angel loosely on his own body and raised it on the site of a former colliery, as a tribute to the coal miners who had worked beneath it; its wings span 54 metres.

A free-standing statue meant to be viewed from all sides, attached to nothing but its base, is sculpture of what kind?

In the round is how sculpture free of any background has been described since about 1800; a century later the theatre borrowed the phrase for a stage with the audience seated on every side.

What material is famously used by American artist Jeff Koons for his 'Balloon Dog' series?

Stainless steel, polished to a mirror and given a transparent colour coating, makes a sculpture more than three metres tall look as weightless as the twisted party balloon it copies.

Joining materials like wood, metal or found objects into a sculpture is known as what?

Assemblage goes back to Pablo Picasso, who from 1912 began building three-dimensional 'constructions' out of scraps; one still life of 1914 is made of offcuts of wood and a length of tablecloth fringe.

Which Italian sculptor created 'The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa'?

Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in 1647-52 for a chapel in Rome and staged it like theatre, with golden rays behind the figures and daylight falling from a hidden window above.

Which Japanese artist is known for 'Infinity Mirrored Rooms' and polka-dot motifs?

Yayoi Kusama says her art springs from hallucinations she has had since childhood, which she coped with by painting what she saw; in the 1970s she moved by choice into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital and worked from a studio nearby.

What kind of suspended, air-moved sculpture did Alexander Calder pioneer?

Mobile was Marcel Duchamp's name for them, coined in 1931; when Calder went on to make sculptures that stood still, Jean Arp answered by dubbing those 'stabiles'.

The ancient Greek 'Discus Thrower' (Discobolus) is a textbook example of which style?

Classical idealism shows in his face: Myron caught the athlete at the peak of his wind-up, yet the expression stays calm and the body in perfect balance; the lost bronze survives only in Roman marble copies.

Dale Chihuly is famous for large-scale sculptures in which medium?

Blown glass on his scale takes a team: Chihuly lost the sight of one eye in a 1976 car crash but kept blowing until he dislocated a shoulder bodysurfing in 1979, and from then on directed other glassblowers.

Which Yorkshire-born sculptor, famed for pierced abstract forms, died in a fire at her studio in 1975?

Barbara Hepworth came to Cornwall with her family as war broke out in 1939 and stayed for life; Trewyn Studio in St Ives, her home and workshop from 1949, is now a museum where her bronzes stand as she placed them in the garden.

'The Gates of Hell', the doorway from which The Thinker emerged, depicts which work?

Dante's Divine Comedy, above all its Inferno, peoples the doors with the damned; The Thinker, seated above them, began as Dante himself, leaning forward to watch the circles of Hell.

Harbin, in China's far north-east, hosts the world's largest festival of sculpture made from which material?

Ice for Harbin's festival is cut in blocks from the frozen Songhua River and built into full-size illuminated buildings that stand from late December until the thaw.

Which American artist is known for large soft sculptures of everyday objects?

Claes Oldenburg turned sculpture's rules upside down: he made hard everyday things soft, in stuffed and sewn canvas, so that they sag and slump and leave their final shape to gravity.

In the ancient 'lost-wax' method of making statues, what takes the place of the wax inside the mould?

Molten metal is poured into the space left when the heat-proof mould is baked and the wax model runs out; the wax is 'lost', which is how the method, used since antiquity for bronzes, got its name.

Which French-American artist is known for her large spider sculptures titled 'Maman'?

Louise Bourgeois made the spider as a tribute to her own mother, a weaver who repaired tapestries in the family's Paris workshop; 'maman' is the French for 'mummy'.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a giant bronze statue of which Greek god?

Helios was the island's patron: the Rhodians paid for his giant bronze by selling the siege engines an enemy army abandoned outside their walls, and an earthquake toppled it only decades later.

What are the carved figures on Gothic cathedrals that serve as waterspouts called?

Gargoyles are carved waterspouts that throw rain clear of the walls, from the Old French gargouille, 'throat'; a similar figure with no spout is technically a grotesque or chimera.

Which American sculptor created the seated Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial?

Daniel Chester French designed the 19-foot seated Lincoln; the Piccirilli Brothers carved it from 28 blocks of white Georgia marble, and it was unveiled at the memorial's dedication on 30 May 1922.

The copper skin of the Statue of Liberty is about as thick as what?

Two stacked pennies, about 3/32 of an inch: the copper is only a thin shell, hung on an internal iron structure that the bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel was hired to design.

Which French Impressionist painter also modelled the sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen'?

Edgar Degas modelled her in wax and dressed her in a real bodice and gauze tutu; she was the only sculpture he ever exhibited, and the bronzes in museums today were cast after his death.

What is the process of hammering a metal sheet from the reverse to create a design in relief?

Repoussé, from the French for 'pushed back', is how the Statue of Liberty was made: her skin is sheet copper hammered into shape from the reverse side.

Which Swiss sculptor is known for his elongated, emaciated bronze figures, such as 'Walking Man'?

Alberto Giacometti, born in Borgonovo in 1901, made his Walking Man bronzes in 1960; the elongated post-war figures captured existential fragility, and Walking Man I sold for £65 million at Sotheby's in 2010.

Which sculptor led the carving of the presidents' heads on Mount Rushmore?

Gutzon Borglum led the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 until his death in March 1941, before the work was done; his son Lincoln Borglum put the finishing touches on it.

The two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited in 2001, stood in cliff niches in which country?

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers blew up both statues in March 2001, after their leader ordered every statue in the country destroyed so that none could be worshipped again.

Which French sculptor designed the Statue of Liberty?

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty; Gustave Eiffel engineered its iron framework, and the copper-clad statue was dedicated in New York Harbor on 28 October 1886.

Which mid-20th-century art movement emphasised primary geometric forms and industrial materials?

Minimalism took the artist's hand out of the work: Donald Judd had his boxes fabricated by industrial manufacturers, and Carl Andre simply set out factory-made bricks and metal plates, fixed with nothing.

Which Italian term names the pose in which a standing figure rests its weight on one leg, tilting hips and shoulders?

Contrapposto, Italian for 'counterpoise', first appears in Greek statues of the early fifth century BC; putting the weight on one leg tilts hips and shoulders opposite ways, so the stone figure seems to relax.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace stands at the top of which museum's main staircase?

The Louvre gave her the head of its grandest staircase in the 1880s; Charles Champoiseau had dug her up in 1863 in more than a hundred fragments, and went back in 1879 for the ship's prow she stands on.