Louis XIV Statue at the Louvre
This is a copy of a statue in Versailles with an incredible story!
In 1665, king Louis XIV, then 27 years old, had commissioned a statue from famous Italian artist Bernini, who was at the time considered the new Michelangelo. The problem is the king only received the finished statue some twenty years later, and he was now 47 years old...

The sun king’s first reaction upon seeing the work of art was to have it smashed to pieces… Instead, he had it moved to a remote and almost hidden location of the gardens of Versailles and then had French sculptor François Girardon “fix” it… After adding a helmet on the head and flames under the horse, the statue now depicted Marcus Curtius: a Roman mythology general who jumped in the fires of hell and sacrificed himself to save the Republic!

A century later, when the French revolutionaries set out to destroy all statues of kings, they spared the statue of Louis XIV disguised as Marcus Curtius… The mythological general who had saved the Roman republic, now saved the statue of a king from the fires of the French republic!