The 38-meter-tall statue weighing over a thousand tons took five years to build. It can be said that it was created with six hands. The engineer Heitor da Silva Costa made the first project, the plastic artist Carlos Oswald was in charge of the final design and the French sculptor Paul Landowski modeled the pieces that make up the statue.
Its construction began to be planned in 1921, when religious and government authorities met in an association called Círculo Católico, in Rio de Janeiro, to discuss the idea. Two years later, a project competition was held, won by Heitor da Silva Costa, and a national campaign raised funds for the work. In addition to Corcovado, Sugarloaf Mountain and Santo Antônio Hill were also mentioned as possible points for the monument.
The desire to integrate the work into nature, however, favored the first mountain, surrounded by a beautiful portion of the Atlantic Forest. According to the original design, the Christ should hold the terrestrial globe in one hand and a cross in the other. Many people, however, thought he would be holding a football. See illustration below.
– (Heitor da Silva Costa/Wikimedia Commons)
The idea of doing it with open arms was more popular with the people of Rio de Janeiro and ended up prevailing. Construction actually only started in 1926. The inauguration ceremony of the statue, on October 12, 1931, was obviously full of pomp, with the presence of then-President Getúlio Vargas. There was also a plan for the illustrious Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi – inventor of the wireless telegraph and a fundamental name in the development of the radio – to activate, directly from Italy, the lights that would illuminate the Christ.
The wild idea came from journalist Assis Chateaubriand. He arranged with Marconi to emit an electrical signal from a yacht in the Bay of Naples. The signal would be picked up by a station in England and retransmitted to an antenna in Jacarepaguá, from where the lights would be turned on. But bad weather did not allow this ingenious artifice to be put into practice – a curious but insignificant setback for the history of the monument that would become a symbol of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil across the planet.
masterpiece Statue took five years to assemble piece by piece. Below, find out about some curiosities of the work
1. The statue was made in France by the French sculptor Paul Landowski – as it was believed, at the time, that Brazilian professionals would not have the experience to carry out the work. Before the work was worked on in its original size, several plaster models were prepared. The hands of the poet Margarida Lopes de Almeida served as a model for those of Christ.
2. The statue came from France to Brazil in pieces. The head alone was made up of 50 pieces and each of the hands measured 3.2 meters in length. To take these giant objects to the top of Corcovado, the train that connected the hill to the lower part of Rio de Janeiro was used, a railroad existing since the end of the 19th century
3. Gigantic wooden and iron scaffolding allowed the workers access to the highest points of the work, while the pieces were lifted by a system of cables and pulleys. The various parts of Christ were hollow and were fitted little by little into the metallic structure assembled to support the weight of the statue.
4. The first part to be finished was the head. Christ emerged, therefore, from top to bottom. All parts on the outside were coated with soapstone tablets, a material that, despite being easily scratched, resists well over time and temperature variations.