The Most Beautiful Sculptures in Europe

31 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Pietà (Michelangelo)

   Pietà vaticana

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

   

   It was carved in 1498–1499 from Carrara marble for a French cardinal, Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, then ambassador in Rome, probably as the altarpiece of his funeral chapel in Old St Peter's. When the old basilica was rebuilt, the group was moved, and it reached its present chapel in the 18th century. The composition is a pyramid, with Mary's head at the apex and her vast, deeply cut drapery spreading down to a base that represents the rock of Golgotha. The drapery also solves a real problem: it hides how large Mary would need to be to hold a grown man so naturally across her lap.

   Did you know? Mary's broken nose was rebuilt using marble taken from a block cut out of the back of the statue itself.

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2. 02 Trajan's Column

   Colonna Traiana

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

   

   What makes the column unique is the frieze: a single band of relief about 190 m long that winds 23 times around the shaft, carrying 155 scenes and more than 2,600 figures. The lower half tells the first war, the upper half the second, separated by a winged Victory writing on a shield. Surprisingly little of it is battle. Soldiers build forts, bridge rivers, fell trees and march in orderly columns; Trajan appears 58 times, addressing troops and making sacrifices. The story opens near the base with the legions' first crossing of the Danube. The detail of weapons, ships and camps makes the frieze one of the best visual sources for the Roman army.

   Did you know? The base inscription says the column shows how high a hill once stood before it was dug away for Trajan's buildings, though excavations have cast doubt on this.

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3. 03 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

   

   The subject comes from The Golden Ass, the Latin novel by Apuleius. Sent to the underworld to fetch a portion of beauty from Proserpina for Venus, Psyche was forbidden to open the jar she carried; on her way back curiosity won, and instead of beauty the jar released a sleep like death. Cupid found her, gathered the sleep back into the jar and woke her. Canova shows exactly that awakening. A British patron, Colonel John Campbell, ordered the group in 1787, and the sculptor worked on it until 1793, but it was never delivered to him. It passed instead through the hands of a collector while still in the studio, then to Joachim Murat, who displayed it at his château in Neuilly from 1801.

   Did you know? The patron, Colonel John Campbell, later the 1st Baron Cawdor, ordered the group in Rome while on his Grand Tour.

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4. 04 Column of Marcus Aurelius

   Colonna di Marco Aurelio

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

   

   The relief spirals 21 times around the shaft. It begins with the army crossing the Danube and then follows the campaigns in scene after scene. Compared with Trajan's Column, the carving is cut deeper, with more drilling and stronger contrasts of light and shadow, and the heads are enlarged so that expressions can be read from below. The mood is harsher too: villages burn, women and children are led away, and the suffering of the defeated is shown plainly. The most famous episode is the "rain miracle" in the land of the Quadi, where a rain god appears to save thirsty Roman troops with a sudden storm, a story later claimed by Christians for their own God.

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5. 05 Laocoön and His Sons

   Gruppo del Laocoonte

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

   

   The group, just over 2 m high, shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by sea serpents, the punishment for warning the Trojans against the wooden horse. Pliny named three sculptors from Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. Whether the work is an original or a copy of an earlier bronze is still debated, and proposed dates range from 200 BC to the 70s AD, with the early imperial period now favoured. The style is Hellenistic "baroque": look at the priest's straining torso, the furrowed brow that an anatomist once called physiologically impossible, and the way the serpents bind the three figures into one struggle while the elder son seems about to break free.

   Did you know? Some scholars have even argued that the statue is a Renaissance forgery by the young Michelangelo, though this remains a minority view.

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6. 06 Moses

   Mosè

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

   

   The prophet is seated, his head turned sharply to his left, the tablets of the Law clamped under his right arm, his fingers raking through a beard that falls like a river of carved hair. Giorgio Vasari wrote that the beard was so soft it seemed the chisel had become a brush. The horns on his head come from a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate of the passage in Exodus where Moses' face shines after speaking with God, and were a common convention in Christian art. Sigmund Freud spent weeks studying the figure in 1913 and argued that Michelangelo showed Moses not about to smash the tablets in rage but in the moment after mastering that anger.

   Did you know? Documents studied by the restorer Antonio Forcellino suggest Michelangelo turned the head after March 1542, some 25 years after the statue was carved.

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7. 07 Artemision Bronze

   Ποσειδώνας του Αρτεμισίου

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

   

   The god stands with his legs wide apart and his arms spread, the right drawn back to hurl something that has since been lost. If it was a thunderbolt he is Zeus; if a trident, Poseidon. Most scholars now favour Zeus, because the pose matches many small bronze figurines of Zeus throwing his bolt, and because a trident would have crossed in front of the face in the side view that was plainly meant to be the main one. The sculptor is unknown. The work is dated to around 460 BC, in the Severe Style that preceded the high classical, and is often compared with the Charioteer of Delphi.

   Did you know? In September 1928 the right arm was seized from an illegal salvage operation, prompting the official recovery of the rest of the statue.

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8. 08 Trevi Fountain

   Fontana di Trevi

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

   

   The fountain as you see it today took decades longer than expected to build. Pope Clement XII opened a design competition in 1730; Nicola Salvi won it, broke ground in 1732, and died in 1751 before the work was done — it was finally finished by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762. The ritual most visitors know it for is far younger than the fountain itself: tossing a coin over your left shoulder to guarantee a return to Rome is a tradition popularized by the 1954 Hollywood film Three Coins in the Fountain, not an old Roman custom at all.

   Did you know? The name comes from the Latin trivium, a meeting of three streets, which once converged at this small square.

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9. 09 David

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

   

   By January 1504 it was clear that a figure weighing around 8.5 tonnes could never be lifted onto the cathedral roof. A committee of about thirty citizens, including Giuliano da Sangallo, Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo, debated where to put it, and the statue was placed beside the entrance of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the city's government, where it replaced Donatello's Judith and Holofernes. Moving it half a mile from the workshop took four days, and it was unveiled on 8 September 1504. Set before the town hall of a young republic threatened by the exiled Medici, the boy who defeated Goliath became a political emblem of Florentine liberty.

   Did you know? Stones thrown during its 1504 journey to the piazza left marks that can still be seen on the upper back.

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10. 10 Venus de Milo

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

    

    The statue was found on 8 April 1820 by a farmer on the Aegean island of Milos, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with a French naval officer watching and encouraging the dig. French diplomats bought it, beating another buyer to the ship, and presented it to King Louis XVIII. Fragments found with it — part of an arm and a hand holding an apple — were long debated; analysis during the 2010 restoration supported the view that they belong to the statue, suggesting she once held an apple, the traditional attribute of Aphrodite as the winner of the judgement of Paris.

    Did you know? A filled hole below her right breast once held a metal tenon that helped support the now-missing right arm.

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11. 11 Perseus with the Head of Medusa

    Perseo con la testa di Medusa

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

    

    Cosimo I de' Medici, the second Duke of Florence, commissioned the statue for a square already crowded with political imagery: Michelangelo's David, Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus and Donatello's Judith were all in place when the Perseus was unveiled on 27 April 1554. The theme was pointed. Medusa turned men to stone, and the statue faces a piazza of marble men; Perseus, the slayer of a monster, stood for the Medici, who presented themselves as the saviours of the city. Bronze had not been used for a monumental figure in Florence for decades, and Cellini, trained as a goldsmith, set out to cast the hero in a single pour rather than in joined sections as Donatello had done.

    Did you know? The curved sword is the only known weapon forged by Cellini; the original is now in the Bargello and the statue holds a copy.

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12. 12 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

    Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila

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

    

    The work was paid for by the Venetian cardinal Federico Cornaro, who wanted a burial chapel in this then modest Carmelite church, and it was finished in 1652, at a time when Bernini had lost the papal favour he enjoyed under Urban VIII. Look up and to the sides to see the full design: daylight falls on the group from a hidden window above and runs down gilded stucco rays; the vault is painted as an open sky with cherubs; and on both side walls members of the Cornaro family, carved in high relief, lean out of what look like theatre boxes, talking among themselves about what is happening at the altar.

    Did you know? The chapel cost Cardinal Cornaro a princely 12,000 scudi, and his transept previously held a painting of Saint Paul in ecstasy.

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13. 13 Charioteer of Delphi

    Ηνίοχος

    Greece38.480° N 22.500° E

    

    The driver is a young man, shown not mid-race but after it, calmly holding the reins on the victory lap. He wears the long tunic of a charioteer, belted high and held with cords across the shoulders and back so it would not billow in the wind; the deep straight folds of the skirt look almost like the fluting of a column, while the folds on the chest turn soft and diagonal. Look at the feet, admired even in antiquity, and at the hand, whose thin fingers still close on the reins. He is one of the few Greek bronzes to keep his inlaid glass eyes, and traces of the copper lips and silver eyelashes remain. The left forearm is lost.

    Did you know? Around 1907 the Venice-based designer Mariano Fortuny named his finely pleated silk Delphos gown after the statue, whose robes it imitated.

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14. 14 Rock Sculpture of Decebalus

    Statuia lui Decebal

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

    

    It is in fact very recent. The rock was bought in the early 1990s by Iosif Constantin Drăgan, a Romanian businessman living abroad, and the work ran for about ten years, finishing in 2004. Twelve sculptors took part under the lead of Florin Cotarcea from Orșova; an initial model and assessment came from the Italian sculptor Mario Galeotti. The first years went on blasting the outcrop into rough shape, the last ones on refining the face: the heavy brows, the eyes set deep under them and the thick beard. Under the chin runs a Latin inscription, DECEBALUS REX - DRAGAN FECIT, "King Decebalus - made by Drăgan", which says as much about the patron as about the king.

    Did you know? Iosif Constantin Drăgan bought the rock in 1992 and paid more than one million US dollars to have it carved.

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15. 15 Winged Victory of Samothrace

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

    

    The statue was found in April 1863 by Charles Champoiseau, a French consular official, in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean. He sent the marble torso and a heap of feather and drapery fragments to Paris and left behind a jumble of grey stone blocks he took for a tomb. It was Austrian excavators in the 1870s who worked out that those blocks, once fitted together, formed the bow of a war galley, complete with oar boxes; Champoiseau went back in 1879 to fetch them. The grey marble has been traced to quarries at Lartos on Rhodes, an island famous for its fleet.

    Did you know? The goddess is not one stone: body, head and bust, both arms and both wings were carved separately and joined with metal fittings.

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16. 16 Madara Rider

    Мадарски конник

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The carving is dated to the very end of the 7th or the early 8th century, the time of Khan Tervel, shortly after the Bulgars settled the region in 680–681. Around the image are inscriptions in medieval Greek. The oldest describes Tervel's dealings with the Byzantine emperor Justinian II, and later ones refer to the khans Krum and Omurtag. Who the rider is remains debated. Early scholars saw him as a version of the Thracian horseman, a Balkan deity; most now link the iconography, including the stirrup and the halo, to Bulgar steppe tradition, while the lion and the rightward movement echo older Thracian art. Candidates include the Bulgar deity Tangra and Tervel himself.

    Did you know? It is regarded as the only early medieval rock relief of its kind in Europe.

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17. 17 Apollo and Daphne

    Apollo e Dafne

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

    

    The marble is carved so thin in places — the leaves, the strands of hair, the tips of the fingers — that it looks as if it should break, and part of that fine work was done by Bernini's assistant Giuliano Finelli. The sculptor planned the group to be read from a single viewpoint, slightly to the right, as a visitor would have seen it on entering the room; from there both faces and the whole transformation are visible at once. It now stands in the middle of the room, so walk all the way round: from the left side you see mostly a tangle of hair and the supports that hold the composition together.

    Did you know? Work stopped in 1623 so Bernini could make his David for the same cardinal; he returned to Apollo and Daphne in 1624 and finished in autumn 1625.

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18. 18 Angel of the North

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

    

    The site was chosen with care. The Angel stands on ground once worked by the Team Colliery, where miners dug coal for more than two centuries, and Gormley said he liked the idea of a figure of light rising where men had laboured underground in darkness. It is built from weathering steel, which forms a stable brown patina, weighs about 208 tonnes and is anchored by concrete piles reaching 20 metres down to rock, so it can withstand winds of over 100 mph. The ribs that run down the body and wings act as an outer skeleton, carrying the wind load to the foundations. Local councillors opposed the project fiercely in the mid-1990s; today it is the best-known emblem of the North East.

    Did you know? Gormley at first refused the commission, saying he did not make roadside art, but changed his mind after visiting the hilltop, which reminded him of a megalithic burial mound.

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19. 19 Lion Monument

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

    

    The lion carved into the sandstone cliff above a quiet pond in Lucerne isn't a monument to a victory — it's a monument to men who kept an oath after the argument for keeping it had already ended. The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen designed the dying lion, pierced by a broken spear and resting one paw on a shield bearing the French fleur-de-lis, but he never set foot in Switzerland to see it made. The actual carving, done directly into the living rock between 1819 and 1821, fell to a local stonemason, Lukas Ahorn, working a face where a single wrong cut couldn't be undone.

    Did you know? The dying lion is about 10 metres long and 6 metres high, carved into the back wall of a disused sandstone quarry.

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20. 20 Lion Gate, Mycenae

    Πύλη των Λεόντων

    Greece37.731° N 22.756° E

    

    The relief fills a triangular limestone slab about 3.6 metres wide at the base and more than 3 metres high, set into the gap left by a corbelled arch that relieves the weight on the lintel. Two lionesses stand facing each other with their forepaws on an altar-like base, flanking a column of Minoan type. Their heads were carved separately and are lost; only the necks remain. The lintel beneath is a single block about 4.5 metres long, 2 metres deep and 0.8 metres high.

    Did you know? Because the heads were separate, some scholars suspect the animals were composite creatures, probably sphinxes, in a Near Eastern tradition.

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21. 21 Sea organ

    Morske orgulje

    Croatia · 3.4 km from Zadar44.117° N 15.220° E

    

    The organ runs along about 75 metres of the waterfront, built as a sequence of terraced steps. Hidden inside them are polyethylene tubes and a resonating cavity, with stainless steel whistles calculated and tuned by the Heferer organ-building workshop. The acoustician and musician Ivica Stamać arranged the notes into seven sound clusters built on two major chords, drawing on the harmonies of klapa, the traditional Dalmatian a cappella song. The project was part of the rebuilding of the city's new waterfront, which after the bombing of the Second World War had been hastily reconstructed as a monotonous concrete wall. In 2006 it shared the European Prize for Urban Public Space.

    Did you know? The harmonies are built on the chords of G major and C6, which alternate from one flight of steps to the next.

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22. 22 The Rape of Proserpina

    Ratto di Proserpina

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

    

    The sculpture is famous for making marble behave like other materials. Pluto's hand presses into Proserpina's thigh as if into living flesh, tears run down her cheek, and her hair and Pluto's beard fly loose. Bernini achieved these effects by switching tools, smoothing skin with abrasives, cutting foliage with a chisel and roughening drapery with a rasp. Proserpina's arm reaches out into empty space, and the heavy figures appear weightless; Cerberus, missing from the only surviving preparatory drawing, may have been added partly to support the group.

    Did you know? Bernini received at least three payments for the work, totalling at least 450 Roman scudi, from Cardinal Scipione Borghese.

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23. 23 Peine del Viento XV

    Peine del Viento

    Spain · 2.1 km from Donostia-San Sebastián43.322° N 2.006° W

    

    Chillida, born in San Sebastián, made the three sculptures, each weighing around 10 tonnes, and set them into natural outcrops rising from the Cantabrian Sea, where the waves break over them. The architect Luis Peña Ganchegui shaped the setting on the shore at the end of Ondarreta beach, a viewing area with openings in the ground through which the incoming waves force air and water upwards. In rough weather the place roars and spouts, and the sea becomes part of the piece. The ensemble was completed in 1976 and is regarded as a key work for both men.

    Did you know? Chillida began his Peine del Viento series in 1952, and the San Sebastián installation is the fifteenth of 23 works he eventually made under that title.

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24. 24 Venus of Lespugue

    France43.235° N 0.663° E

    

    Among the so-called Venus figurines of Palaeolithic Europe, this one pushes the stylisation furthest. Seen from the front, breasts, belly and hips swell into a near-symmetrical diamond, while the small head and tapering legs almost disappear. The back is just as interesting: below the hips the carver cut a hanging skirt of parallel cords, twisted and frayed at the ends. Textile historians have pointed to it as one of the earliest known depictions of spun thread, evidence for string-making tens of thousands of years before weaving on looms.

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25. 25 Farnese Hercules

    Ercole Farnese

    Italy · 1.4 km from Naples40.853° N 14.251° E

    

    It was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where it was excavated in 1546 and went straight into the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. The head had been found separately, and the legs were missing, so Guglielmo della Porta carved new ones. When the original legs later turned up, the new ones were kept, reportedly on Michelangelo's advice, to show that modern sculptors could match the ancients; the ancient legs were only reunited with the body in the late eighteenth century. For generations the statue stood at Palazzo Farnese, copied and engraved endlessly, and Napoleon regretted not getting it for his Paris museum.

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26. 26 The Kelpies

    United Kingdom56.019° N 3.755° W

    

    Their name comes from folklore: the kelpie of Scottish legend is a shape-shifting water spirit, often in the form of a horse, with the strength of many. But the models were very real. Scott based the heads on working Clydesdales, and two of those heavy horses, Duke and Baron, stood for him in the studio. The sculptures are a tribute to the heavy horses that once powered Scottish industry and transport, and they stand at the eastern entrance of the Forth and Clyde Canal, either side of a lock and basin built as part of the project.

    Did you know? Each 300-tonne head rests on steel-reinforced concrete foundations weighing about 1,200 tonnes.

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27. 27 The Endless Column

    Coloana Infinitului

    Romania · 1.2 km from Târgu Jiu45.037° N 23.285° E

    

    The column belongs to an ensemble Brâncuși made to honour the soldiers who defended Târgu Jiu against the Central Powers in 1916. It was commissioned by the National League of Gorj Women; Brâncuși, then living in Paris, accepted in 1935 and refused payment. 3 km long: the Table of Silence, a round stone table surrounded by twelve hourglass-shaped seats; the Gate of the Kiss, a travertine archway carved with Brâncuși's kiss motif; and, at the far end, the Column. Its modules, fifteen full ones with a half module at each end, were cast in iron in 1937 at the central workshops in Petroșani under the engineer Ștefan Georgescu-Gorjan, threaded onto a steel core and given a coat of sprayed brass.

    Did you know? Brâncuși travelled from Paris to Petroșani to oversee the casting, working with the carpenter Carol Flisec on the wooden model of the modules he called beads.

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28. 28 Veiled Christ

    Cristo velato

    Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E

    

    The Veiled Christ was completed in 1753 by Giuseppe Sanmartino, then a young Neapolitan sculptor. It was commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, who was remaking his family's burial chapel and wanted a life-sized Christ beneath a transparent shroud cut from the same stone. The prince first gave the task to Antonio Corradini, already known for veiled figures, who made a terracotta model but died soon afterwards. Sanmartino took over, adapted Corradini's design and produced the work that launched his career. Tradition holds that Antonio Canova later tried to acquire it and said he would give ten years of his life to have carved something like it.

    Did you know? A payment order of 16 December 1752 in the Banco di Napoli archive pays Sanmartino 50 ducats for Christ covered by a veil also of marble, undercutting the alchemy legend.

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29. 29 Christ of the Abyss

    Italy · 22.3 km from Genoa44.313° N 9.175° E

    

    Marcante commissioned the sculptor Guido Galletti, who cast a 2.5-metre bronze Christ with arms raised — not in the fixed pose of a crucifix, but open and upward, as if rising to meet the surface. The statue was lowered onto the seabed at San Fruttuoso on 22 August 1954, at a depth of roughly 17 metres, close to where Gonzatti had died. Bronze corrodes visibly in seawater, and decades of patina and marine growth have since given the figure a greenish, weathered texture that no foundry finish could have produced — the sea has effectively kept working on the sculpture long after Galletti put down his tools.

    Did you know? Corrosion and crustacean growth forced the statue out of the sea for restoration in 2003; it went back down on a new base on 17 July 2004.

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30. 30 Rochers sculptés de Rothéneuf

    France48.687° N 1.968° W

    

    Their author was Adolphe Julien Fouéré, known as the Abbé Fouré (1839–1910). After serving a string of rural parishes in Ille-et-Vilaine, he was obliged in 1894 to give up his post at Langouët, despite a petition from his parishioners, and retired to Rothéneuf, then a coastal hamlet of the seaside resort of Paramé. From late 1894 until 1907 he carved the shore rocks directly, leaving the work exposed to wind and spray, while filling his house in the village, which he called his hermitage, with carvings in wood. Paralysis and loss of speech forced him to stop in 1907, and he died in that house in February 1910.

    Did you know? The abbé began carving in 1894, the same year a stroke left him partly deaf and ended his parish career.

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