Editing Statue (section)

==Renaissance==
[[File:Michelangelo's David - right view 2.jpg|thumb|[[Michelangelo's David|Michelangelo's ''David'']], 1504, housed at [[Galleria dell'Accademia|The Accademia Gallery]] in  [[Florence]], Italy]]
[[Italian Renaissance sculpture]] rightly regarded the standing statue as the key form of [[Roman art]], and there was a great revival of statues of both religious and secular figures, to which most of the leading figures contributed, led by [[Donatello]] and [[Michelangelo]].  The equestrian statue, a great technical challenge, was mastered again, and gradually statue groups.

These trends intensified in [[Baroque art]], when every ruler wanted to have statues made of themself, and Catholic churches filled with crowds of statues of saints, although after the [[Protestant Reformation]] religious sculpture largely disappeared from Protestant churches, with some exceptions in large [[Lutheran]] German churches.  In England, churches instead were filled with increasing elaborate [[tomb monument]]s, for which the ultimate models were continental extravagances such as the [[Papal tomb]]s in Rome, those of the [[Doges of Venice]], or the French royal family.

In the late 18th and 19th century there was a growth in public open air statues of public figures on plinths. As well as monarches, politicians, generals, landowners, and eventually artists and writers were commemorated. [[World War I]] saw the [[war memorial]], previously uncommon, become very widespread, and these were often statues of generic soldiers.

===Modern era===
Starting with the work of [[Maillol]] around 1900, the human figures embodied in statues began to move away from the various schools of realism that had been followed for thousands of years. The [[Futurist]] and [[Cubist]] schools took this metamorphism even further until statues, often still nominally representing humans, had lost all but the most rudimentary relationship to the human form.  By the 1920s and 1930s statues began to appear that were completely abstract in design and execution.<ref>Giedion-Welcker, Carola, ‘’Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space, A revised and Enlarged Edition’’, Faber and Faber, London, 1961 pp. X to XX</ref>

The [[urban legend|notion]] that the position of the hooves of horses in [[equestrian statue]]s indicated the rider's cause of death has been disproved.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.snopes.com/military/statue.htm|title=Statue of Limitations |author=Barbara Mikkelson |date=2 August 2007 |website=Snopes.com |access-date=9 June 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_074.html |title=In statues, does the number of feet the horse has off the ground indicate the fate of the rider? |author=Cecil Adams |date=6 October 1989 |work=The Straight Dope |publisher=Chicago Reader |access-date=9 June 2011}}</ref>