Famous Sculptures: The Statues Everyone Should Know

The most famous sculptures in the world include Michelangelo's David in Florence, Rodin's The Thinker in Paris, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne in Rome. Most of the famous statues people search for were carved in marble in one of three great periods: ancient Greece and its Hellenistic successors, the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, and the Neoclassical and modern age that followed.

This list concentrates on European sculpture in the round, ordered roughly by fame. Below it, a short guide explains why these works became famous, how marble was made to look like skin, lace or a veil, and where to see each one.

How we chose these sculptures

Fame in sculpture is unusually concentrated. A handful of statues are recognized by people who could not name a single sculptor, and most of them share three things: a single, memorable pose; a story or meaning everyone can grasp in a second; and a setting, a museum gallery, a church or a city square, that turned them into a place of pilgrimage. The list puts those icons first, then the works that sculptors and art historians admire most, then the less obvious masterpieces that reward a detour.

The Renaissance giants

Michelangelo's David (1501–04) is probably the most famous sculpture ever made. Carved from a tall, narrow block of Carrara marble that earlier sculptors, among them Agostino di Duccio, had started and abandoned, it stands 5.17 meters high. Michelangelo shows David before the fight, not after: the brow is knotted, the left hand holds the sling over his shoulder, and the oversized right hand hangs ready. The statue stood outside the Palazzo Vecchio as a symbol of the Florentine Republic until 1873, when it was moved into the Galleria dell'Accademia; a copy now takes its place in the square.

Michelangelo's Pietà (1498–99) in St. Peter's Basilica is the other pole of his early career, carved when he was in his early twenties. Mary is shown young and calm, with the body of Christ across her lap; it is the only work Michelangelo signed, his name cut into the strap across her chest. Since a hammer attack in 1972 it has been seen through glass.

Antiquity: the statues that taught the Renaissance

The Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, both in the Louvre, are the two most famous ancient Greek statues, and both are Hellenistic, made in the second century BC. The Laocoön group, dug up in a Roman vineyard in 1506 with Michelangelo reportedly among the first to see it, showed Renaissance sculptors how marble could carry extreme pain and movement. The full story of these works is in our guide to Greek statues.

Baroque marble that moves

Gian Lorenzo Bernini made marble do things no one thought possible. In Apollo and Daphne (1622–25, Galleria Borghese), the nymph turns into a laurel tree as the god catches her: bark climbs her legs, and leaves sprout from her fingers, carved so thin that light passes through their edges. In The Rape of Proserpina (1621–22), also in the Borghese, Pluto's fingers press into Proserpina's thigh as if into flesh. Bernini was in his early twenties when he carved both. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome goes further, combining sculpture, colored marble, hidden light and architecture into a single theatrical scene.

The impossible veils of Naples

Eighteenth-century Naples produced a group of virtuoso works in the Cappella Sansevero that still draw crowds. Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ (1753) shows the dead Christ under a thin shroud so convincingly carved that a legend grew, false but persistent, that the prince of Sansevero had turned real cloth to stone by alchemy. Antonio Corradini's Modesty (La Pudicizia, 1752), a woman entirely wrapped in a transparent veil, belongs to the same chapel and the same game of revealing by concealing.

Neoclassicism and the nineteenth century

Antonio Canova returned sculpture to the cool ideal of antiquity, but with a tenderness the ancients rarely show. Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787–93, Louvre) is built from two crossing diagonals, Cupid's wings and Psyche's raised arms, which frame the empty space where their lips almost meet. Canova finished his marble surfaces with pumice and wax so that they glowed under candlelight, and he liked to show his finished works to visitors by candlelight, when the surfaces seemed to move.

In Lucerne, the Lion of Lucerne (1820–21), designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen and carved into a sandstone cliff by Lukas Ahorn, commemorates the Swiss Guards killed defending the Tuileries in 1792. Mark Twain called it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.

Rodin and the modern statue

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker began around 1880 as a small figure seated at the top of The Gates of Hell, his doorway inspired by Dante's Inferno; it originally represented the poet contemplating his creation. Enlarged in 1904 and cast many times, it became a universal image of thought. The best-known cast sits in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. Rodin's unfinished surfaces, rough marble left around polished bodies, and his fragments of hands and torsos opened the way to twentieth-century sculpture.

Famous statues beyond this list

Some of the world's most famous statues are monuments rather than gallery sculpture and fall outside the catalogue: the Statue of Liberty (1886) in New York, Christ the Redeemer (1931) above Rio de Janeiro, the moai of Rapa Nui, the Great Sphinx of Giza, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin and the Terracotta Army of the first Qin emperor. They belong to the same story of how a carved or cast figure can stand for a city, a nation or a faith.

Other works in the list reward a closer look than their fame suggests. Giambologna's Abduction of a Sabine Woman (1579–83) in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence spirals three bodies upward from a single block, and has no single main view. His Apennine Colossus (c. 1580) at Pratolino, outside Florence, is a giant crouching over a pool, built of stone, brick and rubble, so large that it holds rooms inside. And Louis-Philippe Mouchy's statue of the Duke of Montausier (1781) is famous for a single detail: a marble lace handkerchief at his side.

How to look at a sculpture

Walk around it. Most of the works here were designed to be seen from more than one side, and Bernini in particular plotted a sequence of views as you move. Look at the surface finish: the difference between polished skin, rasped hair and rough-chiseled rock is deliberate. And look at the base, where many sculptors signed, dated or left the marks of their tools.