The Most Beautiful Sculptures in the World

50 places in 21 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Pietà (Michelangelo)

   Pietà vaticana

   Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.902° N 12.453° E

   

   Michelangelo was in his early twenties when he carved the Pietà, and it made his name. The marble group shows the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ across her knees after the Crucifixion, and it is often treated as the work that opens the High Renaissance: a sculpture that combines close observation of the human body with an idealised, classical calm. It stands today in the first chapel on the right as you enter St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, behind a screen of bulletproof glass.

   Did you know? When restorers repaired the hammer damage in 1972, they discovered a small letter M carved into the palm of Mary's left hand.

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2. 02 Trajan's Column

   Colonna Traiana

   Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E

   

   Trajan's Column is a 30-metre marble shaft, 35 m with its pedestal, that has stood in Trajan's Forum just north of the Roman Forum since it was dedicated on 12 May 113. It celebrates Emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in 101-102 and 105-106, and it was most likely designed under the architect Apollodorus of Damascus. The shaft is built from 20 huge drums of Carrara marble, each about 3.7 m across and weighing some 32 tonnes, and inside it a spiral staircase of 185 steps, lit by 43 narrow slits, climbs to a platform at the top.

   Did you know? The lettering of the dedication on the base became the classic model of Roman square capitals, and Carol Twombly based her 1989 Trajan typeface on it.

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3. 03 Colossi of Memnon

   Egypt · 4.6 km from Luxor25.721° N 32.611° E

   

   These two seated figures — about 18 metres tall, roughly 720 tons of quartzite sandstone apiece — are nearly all that remains standing of what was once Egypt's largest mortuary temple, built for Amenhotep III around 1350 BC. The temple itself behind them was dismantled and its stone reused for other buildings in antiquity; the colossi survived purely because they were too massive to be worth moving.

   Did you know? The quartzite was quarried at Gebel el-Ahmar near modern Cairo and transported about 675 km south to Thebes.

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4. 04 Bronze Horseman

   Russia · 0.8 km from Saint Petersburg59.937° N 30.302° E

   

   The Bronze Horseman is the equestrian statue of Peter the Great that has stood in Senate Square in Saint Petersburg since 1782, and it has become the emblem of the city. Catherine the Great commissioned it to bind her own claim to the throne to Peter's legacy, and the inscription on the pedestal says so in Latin and Russian: "Catherine the Second to Peter the First, 1782". On Denis Diderot's recommendation the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet came to Russia in 1766 to make it; Peter's face was modelled by his young pupil Marie-Anne Collot, using the tsar's death mask and portraits.

   Did you know? The monument owes its famous name to Pushkin's 1833 poem, in which the statue comes alive and pursues a poor clerk through flooded streets.

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5. 05 Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss

   Psyché ranimée par le baiser de l'Amour

   France · 1.1 km from Paris48.860° N 2.338° E

   

   Antonio Canova caught the instant just before a kiss: Cupid, wings still spread as if he had only now alighted, cradles the head of Psyche, who rises from a deathlike sleep and lifts her arms to circle his face. The two bodies form a pair of crossing diagonals, and the marble is worked to very different finishes, glassy smooth for skin, softly folded for the sheet across Psyche's hips, rough for the rock beneath, finely feathered for the wings. It is one of the most celebrated works of Neoclassical sculpture, though the charged emotion of the moment already points towards Romanticism.

   Did you know? Canova took the pose from an ancient Roman fresco of a faun and a bacchante excavated at Herculaneum, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

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6. 06 Spasskaya Tower

   Russia · 0.5 km from Moscow55.752° N 37.621° E

   

   The Spasskaya Tower is the main tower of the Moscow Kremlin's eastern wall and the face that the Kremlin turns to Red Square: a fortified gate tower below, a tiered top with a hipped spire, the great clock, and a red star at the summit. Its height with the star is 71 metres. The lower part is the work of an Italian: Grand Prince Ivan III brought Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, and a Latin inscription over the gate records that the tower was built in 1491. It was first named the Frolovskaya Tower after a Kremlin church that no longer exists.

   Did you know? Each of the clock's four faces is 6.12 metres across, with a minute hand about 3.27 metres long and Roman numerals 72 cm tall.

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7. 07 Column of Marcus Aurelius

   Colonna di Marco Aurelio

   Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E

   

   The Column of Marcus Aurelius stands in Piazza Colonna, on the Via del Corso in the centre of Rome, in front of Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government. It was raised to honour the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his campaigns against the Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the Danube, fought from 169 until his death in 180, and was completed around 193. It is modelled closely on Trajan's Column: the shaft is 29.6 m high, stands on a 10 m base, is made of Carrara marble drums and is hollow, with a stair of around 190 to 200 steps lit through slits in the relief.

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8. 08 Laocoön and His Sons

   Gruppo del Laocoonte

   Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.907° N 12.454° E

   

   Laocoön and His Sons is the marble group that launched the Vatican Museums. It was dug up in early 1506 in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill in Rome, and Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it; Michelangelo went too. It was quickly recognised as the Laocoön described by Pliny the Elder, who knew it in the palace of Emperor Titus and called it preferable to all other painting and sculpture. Julius bought it in March, and by August it was on public display in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican, where it has remained ever since.

   Did you know? Pliny described the group as carved from a single block, but it is actually made of at least seven interlocking pieces of marble.

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9. 09 Moses

   Mosè

   Italy · 1.1 km from Rome41.894° N 12.493° E

   

   Michelangelo's Moses sits in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, on the Oppian Hill a short walk from the Colosseum, as the centrepiece of the tomb of Pope Julius II. Julius commissioned the tomb in 1505 as a free-standing monument with more than forty statues; after his death in 1513 the project was cut down again and again, and it was finished only in 1545, with a fraction of the original figures. The Moses, carved around 1513-1515 and 2.35 m tall, would have sat high on the upper tier of the first design; in the final version it is at eye level, in the middle of the lower tier.

   Did you know? According to legend, Michelangelo struck the statue's knee with his hammer on finishing it and demanded, "Why don't you speak?"

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10. 10 Christ the Redeemer

    Cristo Redentor

    Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W

    

    The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa won the 1922 competition to design it, then spent years in Europe developing the plans, where he brought on French sculptor Paul Landowski — who ended up designing the head and hands — while the face itself was modeled by a Romanian-born sculptor, Gheorghe Leonida. Three nationalities, working across two continents, to build Rio's most recognizable landmark.

    Did you know? The statue is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its outstretched arms span 28 metres, and it weighs about 635 tonnes.

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11. 11 Artemision Bronze

    Ποσειδώνας του Αρτεμισίου

    Greece · 0.4 km from Athens37.989° N 23.732° E

    

    The Artemision Bronze, known as the God from the Sea, is one of the few large Greek bronzes of the classical period to survive, and it is one of the highlights of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The figure, slightly over life size at 2.09 m, was recovered from an ancient shipwreck off Cape Artemision in northern Euboea: it was first found in 1926 and raised in further work in 1928, when exploration of the wreck was abandoned after a diver died. The ship sank no earlier than the mid-2nd century BC, and may have been carrying Greek art as loot, though that is not certain. A bronze racehorse with its jockey came from the same wreck.

    Did you know? The first piece to surface was the left forearm, hauled up in fishermen's nets in 1926, two years before the body was recovered.

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12. 12 Trevi Fountain

    Fontana di Trevi

    Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E

    

    What feeds this fountain isn't ornamental plumbing — it's the working outflow of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct finished in 19 BC that has been delivering the same spring water to roughly this same spot for over two thousand years. The Roman legend behind the name says a young woman, a virgo, once led thirsty soldiers to the spring; whether or not that's true, the aqueduct itself is real and still functioning.

    Did you know? About 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, the Trevi is often called the largest Baroque fountain in the world.

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13. 13 David

    Italy · 0.8 km from Florence43.777° N 11.259° E

    

    Michelangelo's David is a marble figure 5.17 metres tall, carved by Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504. It was the first colossal marble statue made since classical antiquity, and it set the standard for sculpture in the century that followed. The block itself had a history before Michelangelo touched it. The Operai, the board in charge of Florence Cathedral, had planned a series of giant Old Testament figures for the buttresses of the cathedral's east end, and in 1464 they commissioned Agostino di Duccio to carve a David. He obtained a huge block from the Fantiscritti quarry at Carrara in 1465, roughed out the legs and torso and then stopped work in 1466, and for decades the half-shaped block lay in the cathedral workshops, described in an inventory of 1500 as badly blocked out and lying on its back. Florentines called it the Giant.

    Did you know? In 1527 an anti-Medici riot broke the statue's left arm into three pieces, which Giorgio Vasari later said he rescued with a friend.

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14. 14 Venus de Milo

    France · 1.2 km from Paris48.860° N 2.337° E

    

    The Venus de Milo is a marble statue of a half-draped woman, a little over two metres tall, almost certainly representing Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. It was carved in the Hellenistic period, most likely in the second century BC, from fine Parian marble, and has been in the Louvre since 1821. The goddess stands with her weight on her right leg, her torso turning gently while heavy drapery slips down over her hips — a pose that looks calm at first glance but, the longer you look, reveals a complex spiral of angles.

    Did you know? Apart from the arms, she is also missing her left foot and earlobes, yet only the nose tip, lower lip, right big toe and some drapery were ever restored.

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15. 15 Perseus with the Head of Medusa

    Perseo con la testa di Medusa

    Italy · 1.3 km from Florence43.769° N 11.256° E

    

    Under the open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands on the slumped body of the Gorgon and holds her severed head aloft, snakes still writhing and blood pouring from the neck. Naked but for a sash, a helmet and winged sandals, the hero looks down rather than out, towards whoever stands below. The bronze, cast between 1545 and 1554, is one of the defining sculptures of Florentine Mannerism, and on the back of the hero's helmet the artist left a discreet portrait of himself.

    Did you know? Cellini signed the statue on the strap that crosses Perseus's chest.

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16. 16 The Great Sphinx

    Egypt · 6.4 km from Giza29.975° N 31.138° E

    

    The Great Sphinx of Giza is a lion with a human head, carved directly out of the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau and facing east toward the Nile Valley. It is 73 metres long from paws to tail and 20 metres high, and is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt. Most Egyptologists date it to the Fourth Dynasty, around 2600–2500 BC, and link it to the pharaoh Khafre, builder of the second pyramid at Giza — though no inscription from the period names its maker, and some scholars argue for his father Khufu.

    Did you know? Its Arabic name, Abu al-Hawl, means father of terror, which may be a folk reworking of the name of an ancient god linked to the statue.

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17. 17 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

    Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila

    Italy · 1.3 km from Rome41.905° N 12.494° E

    

    Bernini did not simply carve a statue for the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria; he staged a scene. Above the altar, Teresa of Ávila sinks back on a bank of marble cloud, eyes half closed and mouth open, while a smiling angel lifts a golden-tipped arrow over her. The episode comes from the saint's own account of a vision in which her heart was pierced and she was left burning with the love of God. Bernini supplied much that she never described, above all the pose of her body, and the ambiguity of that physical abandon has divided viewers ever since.

    Did you know? Teresa of Ávila had been made a saint only in 1622, thirty years before the chapel was finished, as the first saint of the Discalced Carmelites.

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18. 18 Charioteer of Delphi

    Ηνίοχος

    Greece38.480° N 22.500° E

    

    The Charioteer of Delphi is a life-size bronze driver, 1.8 m tall, made around 470 BC and now the centrepiece of the Delphi Archaeological Museum. It belonged to a victory monument at the Sanctuary of Apollo celebrating a chariot win in the Pythian Games of 478 or 474 BC. The inscription on its limestone base names the dedicator as Polyzalus, tyrant of Gela in Sicily. The group originally included the chariot, at least four horses and probably grooms; fragments of the horses were found with the figure. It survived because it was buried under a rockfall, most likely in the earthquake of 373 BC, and French excavators found it in 1896 in three pieces.

    Did you know? When excavated, the bronze had a bluish sheen, echoing Plutarch's remark on the strange blue patina of bronzes at Delphi; it has since turned largely green.

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19. 19 Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

    Russia · 8.5 km from Moscow55.828° N 37.647° E

    

    A man and a woman in stainless steel stride forward, raising a hammer and a sickle so that together they form the Soviet emblem: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is the defining image of Soviet socialist realism, rendered with an Art Deco sense of movement. The idea and composition came from the architect Boris Iofan, who designed the Soviet pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and wanted it crowned by a sculptural group; Vera Mukhina gave the figures their form. In Paris the Soviet and German pavilions were placed face to face across the main boulevard by the Trocadéro, and the pair, striding from west to east along the pavilion's axis, carried a message no visitor missed. Mukhina drew on classical and French models, including the Tyrannicides, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Rude's Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe.

    Did you know? The figures stand 24.5 metres tall, yet their steel skin weighs only about 12 tonnes, hung on an internal frame of some 63 tonnes.

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20. 20 Rock Sculpture of Decebalus

    Statuia lui Decebal

    Romania · 29.7 km from Drobeta-Turnu Severin44.641° N 22.291° E

    

    Where the Danube squeezes through the Iron Gates gorge between Romania and Serbia, a bearded face stares out of the cliffs above the water: Decebalus, the last king of Dacia, who fought Rome and lost to the emperor Trajan at the start of the second century. The portrait is carved directly into a rock outcrop at the Mraconia bay, on the Romanian bank between Eșelnița and Dubova, upstream of Orșova. More than forty metres tall (most sources give around 55 metres, including the rock base), it is usually described as the tallest rock relief in Europe, and from a boat on the river it looms like something from a much older age than it is.

    Did you know? The king's eyes are each about 4.3 metres long and his nose about 7 metres, on a face roughly 25 metres wide.

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21. 21 Winged Victory of Samothrace

    France · 1.2 km from Paris48.861° N 2.338° E

    

    She has lost her head and both arms, yet the Nike of Samothrace remains one of the most physical, wind-filled figures that survive from antiquity. Carved in white Parian marble early in the 2nd century BC, the goddess of Victory is shown at the very instant of landing on the prow of a warship: the right foot has just touched down, the left leg still trails behind, the great wings are swept back, and a thin chiton is plastered against her body by a headwind the sculptor never carved but makes you feel. With its ship-shaped base the monument rises about 5.6 m; the figure alone is 2.75 m. It is one of the very few major Hellenistic statues known from the original rather than a Roman copy.

    Did you know? Her head has never been found, despite three expeditions to Samothrace by her discoverer, in 1863, 1879 and 1891.

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22. 22 Madara Rider

    Мадарски конник

    Bulgaria · 15.4 km from Shumen43.277° N 27.119° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a sheer cliff face above the village of Madara in north-eastern Bulgaria, a horseman rides to the right, spearing a lion that lies beneath his horse's hooves while a dog runs behind him. The relief is almost life-size and is carved about 23 m above the ground into a near-vertical rock wall roughly 100 m high. Centuries of weather have worn away much of the detail, and the rider's halo, his clothing and a bird in front of his face are now hard to make out. It was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979.

    Did you know? The relief itself is about 2.6 metres high and 3.1 metres wide at the base.

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23. 23 Cloud Gate

    United States · 4 km from Chicago41.883° N 87.623° W

    

    Cloud Gate is Anish Kapoor's giant polished-steel bean in Millennium Park, and the first thing to know is that the nickname stuck despite the artist: he called "The Bean" completely stupid before eventually making his peace with it. The sculpture is about 10 metres high, 20 metres long and 13 metres wide, weighs around 100 tonnes, and is made of 168 stainless-steel plates welded and polished until no seam shows. Kapoor took the idea from liquid mercury, and the surface behaves like it — the skyline along Randolph Street, the clouds and the crowd all slide and bend across it.

    Did you know? Kapoor's contract states that the sculpture should be expected to last for 1,000 years.

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24. 24 Aztec Sun Stone

    Mexico · 6.1 km from Mexico City19.426° N 99.188° W

    

    The Sun Stone is a basalt disc 3.6 metres across, almost a metre thick and weighing about 24 tonnes, and it presides over the Mexica Hall of Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. The name glyph of Moctezuma II among its carvings dates it to his reign, between 1502 and 1520. Despite the popular name "Aztec calendar", it was never a working calendar: it uses the signs of time to picture the Mexica view of a cosmos that is created and destroyed in cycles.

    Did you know? Studies by Roberto Sieck Flandes in 1939 showed that the stone was originally painted in bright blue, red, green and yellow.

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25. 25 Watts Towers

    United States · 12.3 km from Los Angeles33.939° N 118.241° W

    

    Seventeen spires of steel and mortar rise over a small corner lot in Watts, their lacy ribs glittering with fragments of green soda bottles, blue glass, seashells, broken plates and tiles. The tallest reaches about 30 metres (99.5 feet). Everything on the site, from the towers to the walls, the pavement and the smaller sculptures, was made by one man: Sabato Rodia, an Italian-born tile setter and construction labourer known as Sam or Simon, who worked on it alone from 1921 to 1954. He called it Nuestro Pueblo, Spanish for "our town".

    Did you know? A photograph of Simon Rodia appears among the crowd of faces on the cover of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

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26. 26 Leshan Giant Buddha

    People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Leshan Giant Buddha is carved directly into a sandstone cliff at the point where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet below the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan. At 71 metres high it is the tallest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue anywhere. It depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, seated with hands resting on his knees and gazing across the water towards Mount Emei. The dimensions are hard to take in from the riverbank: the shoulders are about 28 metres across, the ears around 7 metres long, the head covered with more than a thousand carved coils of hair, and each instep broad enough for a small crowd to stand on.

    Did you know? Each finger of the Buddha is about 8.3 metres long, and his nose and eyebrows each measure some 5.6 metres.

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27. 27 Apollo and Daphne

    Apollo e Dafne

    Italy · 2 km from Rome41.914° N 12.492° E

    

    Bernini was still a young sculptor when he carved Apollo and Daphne for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, between 1622 and 1625, and the group is still displayed in the villa for which it was made. It captures the last second of Ovid's story: the god has just caught up with the nymph, his hand on her hip, and at that touch she begins to turn into a laurel tree. Bark is closing over her thighs, her toes are rooting into the ground and her fingers and hair are sprouting leaves, while Apollo's cloak still flies out behind him from the chase.

    Did you know? Bernini, born in 1598, was only about 23 when he began carving the group in August 1622.

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28. 28 Angel of the North

    United Kingdom · 8.5 km from Newcastle upon Tyne54.914° N 1.589° W

    

    Drivers heading north on the A1 and passengers on the East Coast Main Line see it first: a rust-coloured figure 20 metres high on a grassy mound above Gateshead, its wings — 54 metres across and angled slightly forward — held out flat like the wings of an aircraft. Antony Gormley's Angel of the North was put up in February 1998, and an estimated 33 million people see it each year, most of them from a moving vehicle. The body is based on a cast of the sculptor's own, as in much of his work.

    Did you know? The Angel's wingspan of 54 metres is often compared with that of a Boeing 757, which is actually smaller.

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29. 29 Lion Monument

    Switzerland · 2.5 km from Lucerne47.058° N 8.311° E

    

    On the morning of 10 August 1792, a mob stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris. Louis XVI had already fled to the National Assembly and sent word for his Swiss Guard to stand down — but the order reached the courtyards only after the fighting had already started, and by then most of the officers who could have organized an orderly withdrawal were dead. Roughly 760 Guardsmen were killed that day, a number of them cut down after they had already laid down their arms, in a massacre that shocked even revolutionary Paris.

    Did you know? Roman numerals under the lion record the toll: about 760 Guardsmen killed and roughly 350 survivors, alongside the names of the officers.

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30. 30 Gal Vihara

    Sri Lanka7.966° N 81.005° E

    

    Gal Vihara is a single wall of granite gneiss at Polonnaruwa, the medieval capital of Sri Lanka, into which four images of the Buddha were cut in the twelfth century on the orders of King Parakramabahu I. The monastery it belonged to was called Uttararama, the "northern monastery". Rather than building statues and setting them in place, the carvers worked the living rock, cutting back several metres into the outcrop so that the figures stand out from a smoothed backdrop. The veins and bands of the stone run straight through faces and robes, and at certain hours they read almost like brushstrokes.

    Did you know? To make room for the figures, the granite was cut back almost 4.5 metres, the only place in Sri Lanka where living rock was excavated this deeply for sculpture.

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