Nobody knows what the Venus de Milo was doing with her arms. Scholars have argued for two centuries over whether she held an apple, spun thread, gathered her robe or reached for a shield, and the answer may be gone for good.
She is not the only famous statue with a puzzle attached. The Great Sphinx lost its nose long before the soldier often blamed for it, the Charging Bull on Wall Street started life as an illegal drop-off, and Christ the Redeemer gets hit by lightning several times a year.
Venus de Milo, Paris
The statue was carved in Greece roughly 2,100 years ago and turned up on the island of Melos in 1820. For as long as the modern world has known her, she has had no arms.
The theories pile up because the evidence does not. Proposals include an apple in her hand, thread on a spindle, fingers adjusting her clothing, or a reach toward a shield held by a second figure. Diggers found no further fragments at the site, so the debate has nothing new to settle it.
Michelangelo’s David, Florence
The most admired sculpture in the world began as a failure. In 1464 the Cathedral of Florence hired Agostino di Duccio to carve a David, and he started on a huge and costly marble block, roughing out the legs before he walked away.
About ten years later Antonio Rossellino took a turn and gave up too, calling the stone too flawed to work. The block then sat in a courtyard for 25 years until it went to a 26 year old Michelangelo, who had already finished the Pietà .
The marble was too narrow for the planned sword and the head of Goliath. Even so, he finished the figure in under three years, by 1504.
Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro
Built between 1922 and 1931, the statue stands on the summit of Corcovado, more than 2,000 feet above the city and surrounded by rainforest. That height leaves it badly exposed, and lightning strikes it between three and six times a year.
Some strikes do real harm. A storm in 2008 damaged the fingers, head and eyebrows, and in 2014 the fingers of the right hand were knocked loose again, only weeks before Brazil opened the FIFA World Cup. Lightning rods now run through the head and arms.
Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt
At 240 feet long and 66 feet high, the Sphinx is the largest statue in the world cut from a single piece of stone. The limestone was carved about 4,500 years ago, and traces of pigment suggest the whole figure was once painted.
Experts still cannot say whose face it shows, exactly when it was made or who made it. The missing nose has its own legend, that Napoleon’s troops shot it off for practice. Drawings made decades before Napoleon reached Egypt already show the Sphinx without a nose, so the damage happened centuries earlier.
Winged Victory of Samothrace, Paris
This figure of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, landing on the prow of a ship dates to around 190 BC. Her robes use the Greek “wet drapery” effect, thin cloth that looks pressed against her body by the wind off the sea.
French diplomat Charles Champoiseau dug her up on Samothrace in 1863 in 118 pieces and sent them to the Louvre, where curators put her back together. The head, arms and feet were missing:
- Several later expeditions returned to the island to look for them.
- A right hand was eventually recovered and now sits in a glass case near the statue.
- The head has never surfaced, and after more than 160 years it is presumed lost.
Also read: A Darth Vader Grotesque Hides on Washington National Cathedral
Charging Bull, New York
Nobody commissioned the Wall Street bull, and for a few hours it was technically a crime. Sculptor Arturo Di Modica, who had arrived from Sicily in 1970 with no money, wanted to give something back to the city that made his career.
In 1987 he spent $325,000 of his own money and two years casting a 3.5 ton bronze bull. Then he and a crew trucked it downtown at night and left it outside the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas present, with no permission from anyone.
Police removed it within hours, but the public objected. Within days the city gave in and placed it in Bowling Green Park, where it still stands on a “temporary permit” that was never withdrawn.
Moai, Rapa Nui
The famous Easter Island heads are not just heads. They are complete figures carved between 1250 and 1600, and about 150 of them on the slopes of the Rano Raraku volcano have been buried up to the shoulders for centuries.
Underground, each one has a full torso with arms and hands resting over the stomach, and many have detailed carvings on their backs. Most people only learned this after 2012, when excavation photos spread online. The Rapa Nui carved close to a thousand of these figures and moved some weighing more than 80 tons across miles of ground without wheels or draft animals.
The Thinker, Paris
Rodin’s best known figure was never meant to sit alone. In 1880 he designed it as one small part of a huge pair of bronze doors called The Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
The figure was first called The Poet and sat above the doors, looking down at the damned, most likely a portrait of Dante himself. Rodin later renamed it, showed it on its own and enlarged it past 6 feet. About 28 full size bronze casts now exist, because French law allows up to twelve authorized castings from an artist’s molds after death, and Rodin’s estate has kept producing them under that rule.
Great Buddha of Kamakura, Japan
Cast in bronze in 1252, the Buddha is about 44 feet tall and weighs roughly 121 tons. For its first two centuries it sat inside a large wooden hall, which turned out to be the weak point.
A storm flattened the hall in 1335, and it was rebuilt. An earthquake and tsunami destroyed it again in 1498, and this time nobody rebuilt it, for reasons historians still debate. The statue has sat outdoors ever since, and five more centuries of typhoons, earthquakes and salt air have left it almost intact.
Also read: Mount Rushmore Was Supposed to Have Torsos, and 11 Other Landmark Secrets
Based on reporting by WanderTrivia
By Karen Whitfield | Landmarks