In the constant search for the perfect photo-op, it feels like cutting corners to aim the camera at someone else’s work. Hollywood, of course, has made an industry out of blatant derivation, but that’s hardly a standard to aspire to. Still, every so often, for whatever reason, some aspect of a sculpture will strike us so vividly, that we’ll snap away with abandon. But we’ve never tried to sell one of these photos to an agency or a gallery. It just wouldn’t feel right.
Nevertheless, what follows are 11 of our more fun and fascinating finds. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.
Paris, France - Jardin du Luxembourg - Caius Marius by Victor Alain
This whimsical statue in stone tends to get lost in le Jardin du Luxembourg, a spectacular garden in the Saint-Germain neighborhood that features 106 statues dominated by haughty Queens, radical politics, and the “original” Statue of Liberty. This work sometimes gets misnamed as the Thinker Man, but there was nothing particularly pensive about the life and career of the subject, Caius Marius, a hyper-ambitious Roman general and statesman. Still, on a cool autumn afternoon, there’s plenty to contemplate in the Luxembourg Gardens, and our Marius sets the tone.
Pisa, Italy - Fontana dei Putti by Giovanni Antonio Cybei
One of the three marble Putti (Cherubs) atop the public water fountain installed in 1765 across la Piazza dei Miracoli from the Cathedral of Pisa and the famous Torre Pendente. For such an innocuous subject, the sculpture immediately caused a storm of artistic disapproval that led to repeated attempts over the next 150 years to demolish and replace it. Only in the 20th century with the Age of the Postcard (remember those good old days?) did the Tuscan and clerical fathers discover that by far the most popular postcard of the Leaning Tower featured this fountain in the foreground. Tourism won out, artistic opinions were reversed, and the adorable Putti were saved for good.
Mysuru, Karnataka, India - Gandhi Square
On Independence Day, August 15, 2009, the city fathers of Mysore removed the sheets that had shrouded this life-size statue for more than a year of indecision and officially unveiled its renovated city square. The golden Mahatma is depicted on the route of the Dandi Satyagraha, the Salt March in 1930 that demonstrated the power of non-violent Civil Disobedience and changed world history. In 1927 and 1934, Gandhi visited Mysuru in the south of India on behalf of the Indian National Movement and found a warm reception from both Maharaja and citizens. On special days like Gandhi’s birthday, that affection persists in garlands of flowers draped about his shoulders by the city fathers.
Hunter, New York - Rip Van Winkle
Who has never wished they could fall asleep and take a break from the cares and turmoil of everyday life? In the Washington Irving story of 1819, Rip van Winkle fell into a 20-year nap and missed the entire American Revolution. Rip is commemorated at this crossroads on Main Street in Hunter New York, originally in rough-hewn wood, since replaced with fiberglass. Up on nearby Hunter Mountain, where he drank the strange, ghostly brew that proved his undoing, he is shown waking up in a colossal carving out of the bluestone mountainside.
Lockwood, California - Mission San Antonio de Padua - Junipero Sera
240 years after his death, the jury is still deadlocked on the Franciscan missionary Saint Junipero Serra. Canonized in 2015, he is also the most beheaded and defaced statue in California history. The truth is, Serra gave up an illustrious academic career in Spain to wander the American west coast in search of souls to save. As an individual, he treated his native converts better than he did himself—a low bar for a certified masochist—but history has saddled him with guilt by association with some of the more brutal Spanish pioneers. Here, he watches over the grounds of his third mission, situated oddly enough in the middle of the sprawling US Army training camp of Fort Hunter Liggett.
Milano, Italy - Piazza del Duomo
This is another gorgeous statue that gets lost in the crowd of 3,500 statues, 135 gargoyles, and 700 figures that decorate la Piazza del Duomo in central Milan. A saintly, if scantily clad, beauty slumbers anonymously atop a building across from the cathedral. We actually took the photo from the roof of the Cathedral—the only spot from which it is even visible—to humans, that is. The Audience-of-One for the host of artwork found on and around and above this beautiful Piazza presumably resides in Heaven.
Honolulu, Hawaii - Battleship Missouri - Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz stands by the USS Battleship Missouri, where he hosted the Japanese surrender that ended World War II. The square-jawed Texan graduated from the Naval Academy in 1905 and rose through the new Submarine Divisions to become one of the shrewdest appointments of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime career. It was uncanny how much talent the United States found in its officer corps in that conflict. Perhaps not surprisingly, those officers also found little need for the gold braid and preening self-aggrandizement of previous generations. Here, Nimitz stands in his plain service khakis, eyes on the horizon, brooking no failure or pretension of any kind.
Lago di Maggiore, Italy - Laveno-Mombello Nativity Group by Tancredi da Brendale
In one of the oddest sculpture groups in Italy, these shepherds in white Vicenza stone wade through the waters of Lake Maggiore to wait on the submarine baby Jesus in his manger. Equally waterlogged Wise Men and family members look on. A total of 42 figures have been installed here every Christmas since 1979 by a group of divers called the Amici del Presepe (Friends of the Nativity). The climax of the season arrives on Christmas Eve, when a young married couple brings the stone baby to the dock and hands him off to four divers to insert in his underwater manger. But—and we don’t mean to be picky—does this mean that Jesus was born a day early?
Hyde Park, New York - Roosevelt Home - Power Couple
One of the great Power Couples of modern history. Franklin Roosevelt’s instincts were practical and institutional, and he held American institutions together through unprecedented economic and political catastrophe. Eleanor’s fierce sense of Noblesse Oblige guided her through the same massive social changes and led to her relentless influence on her husband and on American life. Whatever the details of their private life, neither could have scaled all of those mountains without the other. And they both knew it.
Mexico City - Zona Rosa - Calle Amberes - Flight Dance
We named this anonymous pair “Flight Dance” because it looks like they were in the middle of fleeing—before they even got a chance to finish dressing!—when they suddenly broke out into an ecstatic Salsa step. In the hundreds of statues found in la Zona Rosa and Mexico City, this is one of many eccentric artistic expressions dotting the landscape. On the Corner of Calle Amberes and Calle Hamburgo, in an equally odd ensemble of restaurants, trinket shops, and strip clubs, the pair barely stands out.
New York, New York - Rockefeller Center - Prometheus by Paul Manship
In a complex built by oil billionaires to commemorate the progress of the common man, this bronze Prometheus flies earthward with the gift of fire that sets humanity free from the whims of the natural world. Unveiled in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, the optimism and the self-assured belief in the future of American progress proved contagious and made this one of the most popular sculptures of its day.