Sculpture
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45 free Sculpture trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free sculpture trivia questions with answers. Discover how much you know about the world of sculpture with our comprehensive trivia quiz. From classical masterpieces to modern installations, this quiz covers the greatest works and artists in sculptural history. Put your art knowledge to the test and see how you compare!
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sculptor is renowned for creating 'The Thinker'?
Auguste Rodin
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.
Q 02The marble block for Florence's famous Renaissance David was quarried near which Tuscan town?
Carrara
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.
Q 03Anish Kapoor's mirror-polished Cloud Gate, nicknamed 'The Bean', reflects the skyline of which American city's Millennium Park?
Chicago
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.
Q 04The Great Sphinx of Giza, a reclining lion with a human head, was carved from a single piece of which stone?
Limestone
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.
Q 05The monumental 'Christ the Redeemer' statue overlooks which Brazilian city?
Rio de Janeiro
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.
Q 06In the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, the Trojan priest and his two boys are being attacked by what?
Sea serpents
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.
Q 07In sculpture, what is a stele?
A single standing stone
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.
Q 08The giant stone figures called moai stand on which remote Pacific island?
Easter 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.
Q 09London's Elgin Marbles were removed in the early 1800s from which ancient temple?
The Parthenon
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.
Q 10Terracotta sculpture, made since ancient times, is produced by firing which material?
Clay
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.
Q 11Which Renaissance sculptor made the bronze 'David' thought to be the first free-standing nude statue since antiquity?
Donatello
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.
Q 12Who carved the marble Pietà that stands in St Peter's Basilica in Rome?
Michelangelo
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.
Q 13Which British sculptor is known for monumental reclining figures pierced with holes?
Henry Moore
Q 21Joining materials like wood, metal or found objects into a sculpture is known as what?
Assemblage
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.
Q 22Which Italian sculptor created 'The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa'?
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
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.
Q 23Which Japanese artist is known for 'Infinity Mirrored Rooms' and polka-dot motifs?
Yayoi Kusama
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.
Q 14The 'Venus de Milo' is generally thought to depict which Greek goddess?
Aphrodite
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.
Q 15Who found China's Terracotta Army in 1974?
Well diggers
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.
Q 16Which pioneer of modern abstract sculpture made the 'Bird in Space' series?
Constantin Brâncuși
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.
Q 17What art movement is Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain', a porcelain urinal signed 'R. Mutt', associated with?
Dadaism
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.
Q 18Which British artist created 'Angel of the North', a large public sculpture in Gateshead?
Antony Gormley
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.
Q 19A free-standing statue meant to be viewed from all sides, attached to nothing but its base, is sculpture of what kind?
In the round
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.
Q 20What material is famously used by American artist Jeff Koons for his 'Balloon Dog' series?
Stainless steel
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.
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.
Q 24What kind of suspended, air-moved sculpture did Alexander Calder pioneer?
Mobile
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'.
Q 25The ancient Greek 'Discus Thrower' (Discobolus) is a textbook example of which style?
Classical idealism
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.
Q 26Dale Chihuly is famous for large-scale sculptures in which medium?
Blown glass
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.
Q 27Which Yorkshire-born sculptor, famed for pierced abstract forms, died in a fire at her studio in 1975?
Barbara Hepworth
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.
Q 28'The Gates of Hell', the doorway from which The Thinker emerged, depicts which work?
Dante's Divine Comedy
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.
Q 29Harbin, in China's far north-east, hosts the world's largest festival of sculpture made from which material?
Ice
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.
Q 30Which American artist is known for large soft sculptures of everyday objects?
Claes Oldenburg
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.