One of the four colossal statues at Abu Simbel represents Rameses II, who died about two thousand, six hundred years ago. Lying on its side is a broken statue of Rameses II, once 90 feet high and carved from a single thousand-ton block. This and another statue of him in granite ninety feet high were, according to Breasted writing in 1905, “the greatest monolithic statues ever executed.”
But Borglum’s bust of Washington is larger than the whole figure of Rameses, Lincoln’s nose is 21 feet long and the sparkle in his eye is secured by a block of granite thirty inches long.
Some of the Egyptian portraits were carved upon their cliffs somewhat as Borglum’s statues are upon the peaks. At Abu Simbel there are four such statues of enormous bulk.
The Assyrians also built huge monuments, and inscribed the texts of whole histories on the faces of cliffs. Their kings were usually represented as enormous winged bulls with the heads of bearded men. These were called, strangely enough, “cherubs.”
The Greeks created for their greater gods statues of gold and ivory—whence the epithet “chryselephantine.” Such was the colossal Zeus that Pheidias made for Olympia. It was about fifty feet high. Pheidias made also two colossal figures of Athena for Athens, one in bronze that stood up like a lighthouse and was visible to sailors far out to sea. The other had ivory flesh and robes of gold, and was seventy feet high.
The famous bronze Colossus of Rhodes, erected about 274 B.C. by Chares of Lindus, was 105 feet high. It did not straddle a stream, as tradition has it. Half a century after it was set up, an earthquake overthrew it; in 656 A.D. it was sold for junk and carried off by a caravan of 900 camels.
In China one still sees enormous Buddhas, and in our own world the Mayan monstrosities are being brought back from the jungle that swallowed them like a sea.
The statue of Liberty—a gift to us from France—is 151 feet high; with its pedestal it is 305 feet tall.
But none of the giants ancient or modern has approached the size of the greater works of Borglum.
This carver of mountains was himself a mountainy man, born in the mountainous state of Idaho on March 25, 1871. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. His parents had come over from Denmark. His father, at first a woodcarver, became a physician and surgeon, also a breeder of horses on a 6000-acre ranch. He had no money to give his children, but he gave them a love of form and a knowledge of the horse that not only inspired Gutzon Borglum to some of his most magnificent work, but also made a splendid career for his younger brother, Solon. Solon took fire from Gutzon’s fire, worked his way to Paris, won honors there, and came home to his West where he turned out a stream of important sculptures that perpetuate many poignant phases of Western life. His life was suddenly ended in 1922 by an attack of acute appendicitis.