Print Size: 8.5 x 11 (Frame: 16 x 20) Sculpto: Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi
As he traveled across the United States promoting the Statue of Liberty, French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi was filled with awe. “Everything in America is big,” he wrote, “…even the peas are big." He would take the virtue of size to heart as he planned the Statue of Liberty, the largest sculpture in the world: 151 feet high (305 including its base) with the weight equivalent of roughly 40 elephants. Bartholdi had learned from ancient Egypt that monumental form demanded an entirely different approach than smaller sculpture. “… Surfaces should be broad and simple, defined by a bold and clear design…,” he explained, “and have a summarized character such as one would give to a rapid sketch.” Bartholdi began with a 4-feet-high model, enlarged it to nearly 9.5 feet, and then zoomed up to one-quarter final size. He next divided the whole into some 300 pieces, and then, through thousands of painstaking measurements, pointed up each piece individually for a full size plaster cast. He then fabricated a wooden mold precisely fitted to the contours of each plaster component. After that, great sheets of copper, 1/10 inch thick, were rammed and hammered into the wooden mold in order to shape the statue’s skin. The individual pieces were then extracted from the wooden molds, feather-edged together on the statue’s heavy iron armature, and joined by flush rivets, as is visible here on the cheek and upper lip of Lady Liberty’s 4-feet-wide mouth. In this view of the statue’s restoration in 1984, workers size up what Emma Lazarus called “The New Colossus” in her epic poem of 1903: “…Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
