Medallion

1884

France’s greatest living revolutionary, poet, and novelist, Victor Hugo, received this medallion from Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi after visiting the Statue at the Paris workshop in 1884. Hugo proclaimed, “Form to the sculptor is all and yet nothing. It is nothing without the spirit; with the idea it is everything.”

Mixed metals, copper, silk, wood. L 7.6, W 9.3 cm.
Statue of Liberty National Monument, STLI 135