9781422287538

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Sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, the man who created the Statue of Liberty, used several women as models for the statue. One of them was his mother, Charlotte (inset).

W hen the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi accepted the job of designing a huge monument to the cause of liberty, he faced an immense problem: How does one portray liberty? He found his answer in America. During a visit to the United States in 1871, Bartholdi noticed that many American coins were engraved with a Roman goddess. Liberty, Bartholdi concluded, would be a woman. Next, he borrowed heavily from a design he had con- ceived in 1869 while visiting Egypt, where the Suez Canal was under construction. The Suez Canal was a waterway that French engineers were digging. It would connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Bartholdi had proposed a giant statue of a woman holding a torch aloft to serve as a lighthouse at the canal’s entrance, but the The Face of Liberty

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