Monuments of Motherhood: Five Statues That Tell the Story of Motherhood

Some moments in travel stop you mid-step. You round a corner, look up, and feel your chest tighten. For many of us who are mothers, those moments happen most often in front of a work of art that captures what we live every single day but can rarely put into words: the tender, aching love of raising a child.

Sculptors across centuries and continents have returned again and again to motherhood as their subject. Each of the five sculptures below holds a different facet of that love: its tenderness, its grief, its resilience, its cultural memory. If you ever find yourself standing before any of them, give yourself a moment. They were made for exactly that pause. 

Pietà by Michelangelo 

Perhaps few, if any, sculptures in Western art speak more directly to the heart of a mother than Michelangelo’s Pietà. It shows the Virgin Mary cradling the body of her adult son after the Crucifixion. What strikes every visitor is the quietness of the scene, not the grandeur of the piece. Mary does not scream. She holds her son silently in her grief.

After seeing Pietà, many visitors find that they want to write something down, whether it is a memory of their own child, a letter to their mother or maternal figure, or a thought they did not know they were carrying.

Maman by Louise Bourgeois

Nothing in the art world prepares you for the first time you witness Maman in person, a towering steel spider that serves as an unlikely yet powerful monument to maternal love. Louise Bourgeois drew inspiration from her mother, Josephine, a tapestry maker whose connection to weaving and spider-like qualities of cleverness and protectiveness gave rise to the sculpture's arachnid form.

Maman, French for "mom" or "mommy," delves into the contrasting dualities of motherhood, with Bourgeois incorporating a sac of marble eggs beneath the spider's abdomen to highlight silk's protective function, subverting the common perception of spiders as purely predatory creatures. Through this, the sculpture captures the spider's dual nature as both protector and predator, serving as a compelling metaphor for the complex role of mothers. The sheer, imposing scale of Maman commands both awe and unease, its towering legs simultaneously evoking the bars of a cage and the sheltering walls of a sanctuary, a space as contradictory as motherhood itself.

Famine Memorial by Rowan Gillespie

On the docks of Dublin, along the River Liffey, seven bronze figures walk perpetually toward the water. Among the seven figures is a mother. Her clothes are tattered. Like her companions, she was in despair. Even in the hopelessness of the Great Famine that killed or displaced more than two million Irish people, she carries her child close to her chest and moves forward.

For those of us who have worried about our children, this figure resonates differently than she might for others. She is every mother who has carried her family though something hard and kept walking. The statue says nothing about victory but it does express the resilience of a mother who has to push through for her child.

A companion installation by the same sculptor, Arrival, stands in Toronto, Canada, where many famine survivors emigrated.

Mother Motherland by Vasyl Borodai

Despite standing 62 meters tall atop a 40-meter base, the titanium figure of Mother Motherland in Kyiv captures something deeply intimate, a feeling every mother knows. Sculptor Vasyl Borodai created her as a symbol of a nation’s will to protect its children.

Motherhood is so often reduced to tenderness and nurturing but Mother Motherland refuses that image entirely. She is unyielding and formidable. Sword raised, shield in hand, she stands poised at the threshold between her people and whatever threatens them. In the decades since her unveiling in 1981, as Kyiv has endured unimaginable hardship, this defiant guardian has only grown more vital, not merely as a monument, but as a mother her people continue to look up to.

Pietà (Mother with her Dead Son) by Käthe Kollwitz

In the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) at the heart of Berlin, a single bronze figure sits alone in a vast room open to the sky. She is a mother, folded inward over the body of her adult son. Above her, an oculus cuts through the ceiling, leaving her exposed to every shift in weather. Whether it rains, shine, or snows, she stays there, as if mourning is the only permanent fixture in her life after the loss of her son.

Käthe Kollwitz did not sculpt this from imagination alone. She had already buried a son lost to the First World War. She knew the exact weight a mother’s grief has. That knowledge lives in the way the mother’s body curves around her son’s, as if trying to reclaim him, to fold him back into the safety he once knew within her. It is a posture that speaks to something beyond grief: a longing to undo time itself, to return to when her body protected him, and she could still keep him from the world.

If you travel to any of these, or if you happen upon one by chance during a trip with your family, stay a little longer than you think you need to. Let your children ask what it is and tell them the stories behind these statues.

Bring a piece of your memory home through our travel stickers.