The New York Statue of Liberty may be the most famous colossus in the world, but it has its rivals. This recent giant, The Motherland, rallying her sons, commemorates the Soviet victory over the Germans in the last war, and dominates Volgagrad, formerly Stalingrad. The sculptor, Evgeni Vuchetich, combined the scale of Bartholdi’s matron with the dynamism of Delacroix’s freedom-fighter.

The Pharos at Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes, two of the seven Wonders of The World, inspired Beaux-Arts students to design these anthropomorphic lighthouses in 1851–2.

Claes Oldenburg mocked the pompous propaganda of the monumental tradition when he proposed a corset for the grand entrance of a stock exchange.

In 1918, Joseph Pennell imagined the symbol of the free world decapitated and New York in flames, for a fund-raising poster.

The Statue of Liberty was first built in Paris.

Then shipped in pieces to Bedloe’s Island, New York, which was renamed Liberty Island for her unveiling in 1886.

Parisian allegories: in the Place du Palais Bourbon, Feuchère’s La Loi commemorates Louis Napoleon seizing power.

On the Pont Alexandre III, Michel’s La France contemporaine looks like a fashionable Parisienne of the day.

In the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, variations on the classical caryatid stand in pairs.

At the Grand Palais, a sculptor, by Paul Gasq, discovers a nude muse within the marble.

And on the roof, Immortality overtakes Father Time.

The Place de la Concorde: a monument to Louis XV was replaced during the Revolution by a Minerva, symbolic of Liberty and the Republic.

She then presided over the guillotine.

The site vanished under a fountain when the square was redesigned, from 1836 to 1846.

The towns of France, personified as classical goddesses, were added to the décor.

In the Belle Epoque, their descendants personify the inventions of the age: La Mécanique at the Gare de Lyon.

At the entrance to the Tuileries gardens lies a nuptial pair of rivers, Corneille van Cleve’s La Loire et le Loiret.

The façade of the Louvre teems with nymphs, including Jean Goujon’s exquisite huntresses.

Le Téléphone at the Hôtel de Ville.

Britannia first appeared as a defeated nation: the Emperor Claudius seizes her in a bas-relief from Asia Minor.

Autoninus Pius later commemorated the conquest of the island on his coins by representing Britannia with her war gear and spiked shield.

The Duchess of Richmond, the King’s mistress, posed for John Roethier’s medal in 1667.

Britannia later became a military Athena, as on this penny dated the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, but all the coins hark back to the Roman prototype.

Britannia was once identified with the body politic: George Cruikshank in 1819 saw her as embodying ‘the Virtues of the Constitution’.

In 1983, the Sun’s front page proclaimed those virtues were now incarnate in Margaret Thatcher.

Britannia’s identification with Britain’s fighting spirit has not declined in this century: in 1912 the plight of Belgium inspired an artist’s model to try a patriotic pose, ‘Britain steps in’.

After the Falklands War, the Iron Lady’s success was lampooned by Raymond Briggs.

The peace camp at Greenham Common, 1984 with ‘benders’, the only shelters of the demonstrators.

A slogan painted in 1982 at Upper Heyford summed up one view of women’s predicament.

A virgin daughter and a virgin mother, Athena springs fully armed from the head of her father Zeus, while the Eileithyiae, goddesses of labour, help with the birth.

And receives her adopted son Erichthonius from his mother Gaia, Earth.

On an archaic metope from Sicily, Medusa is beheaded by Perseus, Athena’s protégé, while the goddess, embodiment of due order, stands by.

And in a children’s book of 1928, she shoots down from Olympus ‘like a falling star’.

She presides outside Vienna’s parliament buildings, in a statue of 1902.

Minerva was the patroness of artistry and learning and handiwork, a sister of the Muses. Christine de Pisan invoked her help when writing a treatise on the rules of chivalry.

She inspired the attributes of armed maidens in the Renaissance, like Rhetoric on a Tarot card, with her sword of discrimination.

The Seven Liberal Arts, associated with Wisdom or Sapientia, included Grammar, who at Chartres attempts to discipline her charges.

And Music, who confers knowledge of her subject on a youthful prince, possibly Federigo da Montefeltro, in Joos van Wassenhove’s painting.

In an inspired variation on the ancient theme of the Battle of the Virtues and Vices, Andrea Mantegna showed the goddess Minerva attacking Lust and Ignorance and other Vices while the Virtues look down on her from heaven.

Nike, goddess of victory, still flies through the air, though her wings are lost, in this roof ornament from a temple in the Agora of Athens.

On a red-figure cup, she ties a sash around a willing bull.

The classical Nike, like the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace ...

... inspired the iconography of Byzantine Christian archangels, with their sweeping wings, as in the twelfth-century mosaic of St Michael from the church of La Martorana, Palermo.

The Emperor Justinian’s equerry, both angel and Victory, on his golden medallion ...

... reappears nearly one thousand four hundred years later in the modern urban landscape of New York, attending General Sherman by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Thomas Brock’s Victoria Monument in the Mall, London, uses the classical language of personification without incongruity.

Le Nain’s allegory in the Louvre.

But when a real woman stands in for Victory, as in Eric Peltier’s spoof of Le Nain’s allegory, the convention becomes hard to accept.

François Rude adapted the classical winged figures of Nike and Fate in his famous sculpture on the Arc de Triomphe, known as La Marseillaise, which celebrates the partisans of 1792.

In the next century, Walter Benjamin was inspired by another winged figure, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, to meditate on catastrophe, warfare and history.

The nymph Cyrene, founder of the colony of that name in Africa, lived wild and was so strong that she overcame a lion with her bare hands.

The classical type of Amazon inspired the allegorical virtue Fortitude, wrestling with a lion, in the twelfth-century mosaics in St Mark’s, Venice.

Where the Virtues appear with a chorus of heavenly Beatitudes, including Humility dancing.

On the cathedral at Strasbourg, the Virtues, personified as queenly maidens, trample the Vices, represented as their social inferiors, contemporary burgesses.

A tapestry version of the same Christian theme, the Psychomachia, shows Charity in gorgeous apparel, seizing Envy, portrayed here as a craven knight.

Donatello’s bronze Judith of 1457 warned that ‘Kingdoms fall through licence’ and ‘cities rise through virtue’.

The biblical heroine who slew the tyrant Holofernes became a pattern of Christian justice and courage; her emblem, the sword, is also Justice’s attribute, as in Brueghel’s unsparing engraving of the penalties meted out in the virtue’s name.

W.H. Thornycroft, for his sculpture of Courage on the Gladstone Monument in London, created a Victorian version of the armed maiden.

Conrad Meit made explicit the latent sexual ambiguities of the Judith story with his naked, painted, alabaster statuette.

The murderous stereotype became so common that the photographer Olga Wlassics, in Vienna around 1930, made fun of the insistent morbidness of the tradition.

Artemisia Gentileschi [...] treated the heroine’s exploit with a passion that sprang from her own personal history of sexual mistreatment.

Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted her self-portrait as La Pittura (Painting).

Boethius, the author of The Consolation of Philosophy, saw the Lady Philosophy herself in a vision.

His description influenced the iconography of the biblical Sophia, or Wisdom, and of her exemplar and faithful daughter, the Church, Ecclesia. Hildegard of Bingen, in the twelfth century, commissioned illuminations of her visions from a scribe.

And represented Ecclesia with nuns like Hildegard and her community tucked up in her breast.

The Allegory of Good Government in Siena, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, perhaps the finest allegorical cycle of mediaeval secular art, shows Justice enthroned on the left, beside a dais, on which the personified Commune of Siena sits, with the four Cardinal Virtues on either side of him.

Lorenzetti added Peace to the conventional quartet, and she reclines tranquilly beside Fortitude and Prudence, trampling weapons with her bare feet, with a wreath of olive on her head.

Angelica Kauffmann liked to represent herself as a Muse, as in this painting of The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, in which she sits beside her friend the writer Maria Cosway.

Vermeer’s The Art of Painting shows one of the artist’s familiar models posing as the Muse of History, Clio, while at the same time remaining palpably herself.

The first woman, Pandora, arrayed in the bridal headdress wrought for her by the gods and goddesses who created her, greets Epimetheus her husband as she rises out of the earth from which she was made.

Eve, the first woman of the Christian tradition, often issues from Adam’s side, as if he were giving birth to her, as in Bartolo di Fredi’s fresco in San Gimignano.

Tuccia, a Vestal Virgin, was accused of unchastity, but proved herself true when she miraculously brought back the waters of the Tiber intact in a sieve. Jacopo del Sellaio included her, centre foreground, in his Triumph of Chastity, beneath Eros bound, who is having his wings clipped.

Moroni painted Tuccia as an allegory of Chastity.

And Elizabeth I adopted her sieve as a device.

A virtuous body must appear a sound, watertight container, like the jar of precious ointment that is Mary Magdalen’s attribute, as in this painting by Jan van Scorel.

Or the miracle shopping-basket of a 1985 advertisement.

In the sculptures of Magdeburg cathedral, the Foolish Virgins, epitomes of female weakness and incontinence, weep, for the heavenly bridegroom has refused them entrance.

In Martin Schongauer’s engraving, one shows us her empty lamp, emblem of her sinfulness.

Frida Kahlo, with her self-portrait The Broken Column, uses the imagery of female grief, weakness and vulnerability to create a powerful personal testimony to pain.

In the Artemisia Gentileschi plate from The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago purposefully conjures the most feared aspects of women’s physical characteristics to try to create an affirmative vision of the female sex.

Liberty Guiding the People by Delacroix recalls the July Uprising of 1830, by introducing the goddess into an acutely observed crowd of participants.

Jules–Aimé Dalou’s The Triumph of the Republic of over fifty years later celebrates Marianne in similar allegorical dress, but surrounded by symbolic figures: Justice and the Genius of Liberty, on the model seen here.

And Peace scattering flowers, from the monument in the Place de la Nation, Paris.

The slipped tunic or chiton of the Greek Amazons, as in the relief from Ephesus, conveys the untameable character of their courage and ardour, and was borrowed by the figure of Marianne, the French Republic.

It also became part of the imagined costume of ideal Gallic ancestors, like the heroine Velléda, carved by Hippolyte Maindron in 1869.

The breast can also stand for maternal bounty and love: the Virtue Charity is represented with nurslings in Jacopo della Quercia’s sculpture.

And the barefoot Madonna, giving suck to the naked child, in Orazio Gentilesehi’s painting, expresses the full mystery of her humility in consenting to the incarnation.

In Rubens’ vision of the apotheosis of Marie de Médicis, The Felicity of the Regency, the Queen, in the undress of Charity with the scales of Justice, assumes her pre-eminent place in the rich and crowded pageant as an allegorical figure among many. Abundance, Health, Wisdom and various cherubs personifying the arts and sciences flourishing under her reign surround her, while Vices writhe in their bonds.

The later Republic, not to be outdone, indicates her good and generous heart.

The uncovered human body is not as rare in Christian imagery as is usually thought, and carries a wide range of meanings. Saint Eugenia, accused of bearing a child, proves the charge false by showing her sex on a capital at Vézelay.

Angels and devils struggle to capture human souls, including a Friar Tuck, in the frescoes of the Last Day in the Camposanto in Pisa.

And Mary Magdalen, after her conversion, lived in naked penitence to symbolize her rejection of all worldly vanities.

At Moissac, the sculpture of Luxuria (Lust) is devoured by snakes in the parts tainted by her sin.

Gregor Erhart’s Vanitas, a polychrome carving, warns against the pleasures of this world, as ‘all flesh is as grass … and the flower thereof falleth away’.

Truth is depicted naked, for she has nothing to hide. In Botticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles, the evil judge in ass’s ears on the right listens to the slanders against the victim whom Discord is dragging by the hair; on the left, naked Truth points to heaven, where all will be revealed, while Remorse creeps from her in shame.

In François de Troy’s Truth Unmasking Envy, Truth’s naked foot forms a contrast with Envy’s heavy shoe, for Envy dissimulates while Truth conceals nothing.

In Charles Cochin’s design for the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, arts and sciences, including recent disciplines like Optics, join the Virtues in the throng around Truth, the source of light for the siècle des lumières.

In Bernini’s sculpture, Truth emerges radiant from the veils in which she is wrapped, holding the sun in her hand.

Lady Godiva, who rode through Coventry clothed only in her hair, becomes in her goodness and innocence a type of naked Truth, as in this anonymous sixteenth-century picture.

At the turn of the present century, advertisements like this poster for bicycles annexed the aesthetic tradition to sell their products.

Longings for Arcadia often inspire visions of the nude: Gravelot’s design for La Nature shows her undraped, at one with animals and flowers.

Barbara Kruger, in a recent photo-collage, challenges such identifications of Woman and Nature.

In Judy Dater’s image, the photographer Imogen Cunningham appears beside Twinka the model, like a strayed city-dweller surprising a dryad in her proper place.

Titian’s famous painting, traditionally called Sacred and Profane Love, has inspired many different explanations, which reveal in their very contradictions the ambiguity of the nude: is it the naked figure who is profane, or the other way round? Are both figures aspects of the same woman?

Thomas Eakins, with his painting William Rush Carving the Schuylkill River, tried to vindicate the holiness of the naked female body, and the practice of life-modelling itself.