Statue of Liberty

 

 

  

  

The Statue of Liberty (French: Statue de la Liberté), or, more formally, Liberty Enlightening the World (French: La liberté éclairant le monde), was presented to the United States by the people of France in 1886. Standing on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, it welcomes visitors, immigrants, and returning Americans traveling by ship.[5] The copper-clad statue, dedicated on October 28, 1886, commemorates the centennial of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence and was given to the United States to represent the friendship established during the American Revolution.[6] Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and obtained a U.S. patent for its structure. Maurice Koechlin - chief engineer of Gustave Eiffel's engineering company and designer of the Eiffel Tower - engineered the internal structure. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was responsible for the choice of copper in the statue's construction and adoption of the repoussé technique, where a malleable metal is hammered on the reverse side.

                                                 The statue is of a robed woman holding a torch, and is made of a sheeting of pure copper, hung on a framework of steel (originally puddled iron) with the exception of the flame of the torch, which is coated in gold leaf (originally made of copper and later altered to hold glass panes). It stands atop a rectangular stonework pedestal with a foundation in the shape of an irregular eleven-pointed star. The statue is 151 ft (46 m) tall, but with the pedestal and foundation, it is 305 ft (93 m) tall.

                                The statue is the central part of Statue of Liberty National Monument, administered by the National Park Service.The general appearance of the statue’s head approximates the Roman Sun-god Apollo or the Greek Sun-god Helios as preserved on an ancient marble tablet (today in the Archaeological Museum of Corinth, Corinth, Greece) - Apollo was represented as a solar deity, dressed in a similar robe and having on its head a "radiate crown" with the seven spiked rays of the Helios-Apollo's sun rays, like the Statue's nimbus or halo. The ancient Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was a statue of Helios with a radiate crown. The Colossus is referred to in the 1883 sonnet The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. Lazarus's poem was later engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty