Free Sculpture & Statue Pictures: 120 Photos

120 free sculpture and statue pictures from the BigFoto library, most of them found in the streets, parks and squares of Swiss towns: the statue of Freddie Mercury on the lakeside in Montreux, a bronze couple and a businessman with his briefcase, horses, lions and a giant ant, Pinocchio and a painted cow, garden gnomes and Lego bricks, monuments and a marble relief, and modern sculpture in rusted steel, polished bronze and granite.

Use them for articles about art and cities, school projects, slides and posters. Many statues stand against an open sky, which leaves room for a title.

How to download: click a photo to see it large, then use Download. The originals are about 1200 × 800 pixels: right for blog posts, slides, social media, school projects and video call backgrounds.

Statues of people

Famous people and everyday figures in bronze and stone: Freddie Mercury and Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, a couple out walking, a businessman, a flute player, a football player, people on a bench and a small Statue of Liberty.

Animals

Horses, a lion, owls, a rhino, a rabbit carved from a tree trunk, a giant ant, a fish, a dragon, a lizard on a wall and a painted cow.

Playful figures

Pinocchio, Tom and Jerry, two children kissing, garden gnomes, Lego bricks, a stone car and a giant hand.

Monuments, columns and reliefs

Tall columns and obelisks, granite gates on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, a marble relief, totems and works set into walls.

Modern and abstract sculpture

Rings, spheres, curves and folded steel in parks and in front of offices: bronze, stone, glass and painted metal.

More statues and sculptures

Juliet and Dante in Verona, the Caryatids of Athens, David in Florence, the Sun Voyager in Reykjavík, Alexander the Great in Thessaloniki and the elephants of Ellora.

Stone lion at the end of the Chain Bridge

Bronze fountain sculpture with figures in Düsseldorf

About sculpture

Sculpture is any three-dimensional form created as an artistic expression. Sculpting is the art of assembling or shaping an object. It may be of any size and of any suitable material. The artist who does this is called a sculptor.

Sculpture is among the oldest of the arts. Even before painting on cave walls, early humans fashioned shapes from stone. From these beginnings, artefacts have evolved to their current complexity. The point at which they become art is for the beholder to decide. In any case, sculpture should be placed among the greatest of human achievements.

Famous sculptors

Michelangelo, 1475-1564: So famous that he is known by a single name, instead of his full title ‘Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’. The original “Renaissance man”, Michelangelo was also a painter, poet, architect and engineer. He lived in Florence (Firenze), where the Medici family were important patrons of the arts at the time. His first important piece was his ‘Pieta’ in 1487, and his masterpiece was ‘David’, a 4.3 metre male nude in Carrara marble, currently exhibited at the Uffizi Gallery in Firenze.

Henry Moore, 1898-1986: the best known English modern sculptor and one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Moore’s semi-abstract stone figures are instantly recognisable and sell for huge sums: his “Reclining Figure: Festival”, created in 1951 sold for £19.1 million after his death.

Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966: An Italian-Swiss painter and sculptor, famous for his Surrealist sculptures, some influenced by primitive art, but others like architectural models. In the 1950s he produced his celebrated representations of human forms as isolated attenuated figures. In 1962 Giacometti won the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In 2015 his figure “L’Homme au doigt (Pointing Man) sold for US $141.3 million. Another of his pieces, “L’Homme qui marche 1” (Walking Man 1) was shown on the 100 Swiss Franc banknote.

Barbara Hepworth, 1903-1975: English artist and sculptor well known for her modern abstract pieces, many being figures in stone with holes pierced through them. Hepworth was married to the painter Ben Nicholson, and lived and worked in St Ives on the Cornish coast of England for many years. She was a friend and colleague of Henry Moore.

Jean Tinguely, 1925-1991: a Swiss painter and sculptor educated in Basel but working in Paris, and best known for his “metamechanics” – sculptural machines and kinetic art pieces. His best known work is “Homage to New York” in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Famous pieces of sculpture

Easter Island Moai, 1250-1500: hundreds of stone figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on the Polynesian Easter Island and somehow transported from the quarry where they were sculpted to their standing position, near the coast but facing inland. With over-large heads and no legs, the tallest of the 887 figures is almost 10 metres (33 feet) and weighs 82 tons (74,000 kgs). Archaeologists believe the figures to be symbols of religious and political power, representing the ancestors of the artists.

The Elgin Marbles: More properly the “Parthenon Marbles”, but better known by the name of Lord Elgin who had them removed between 1801 and 1812 and transported to Britain, where they remain in the British Museum, in defiance of Greece’s demands for their return. The classical marble statues were made by the Greek sculptor Phidias and his assistants in the 5th century BC for the temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens.

Gargoyles: when building gothic cathedrals, stonemasons would decorate rainwater spouts and the tops of pillars with often grotesque figures of people or animals. Medieval gargoyles might be representations of monks or devils, and the masons seem to have had licence to create them humorously to their own designs. Notre Dame de Paris is a cathedral known for its gargoyles.

Pictures Sculptures

More free photos

Questions about these sculpture photos

Can I use these sculpture pictures for free?

Yes, for personal and commercial projects. All we ask is a link back to BigFoto.com; the box at the top of the page has a credit link you can copy.

Can I use photos of public sculptures commercially?

Our licence covers the photo. In many countries, including Switzerland and Germany, works permanently placed in public may be photographed and shown freely; in some others, such as France and Italy, recent sculptures can still be protected by the artist’s copyright, so check before using them on products.