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Japanese Stand far enough back on the bay at Rio and the figure resolves into the shape it stands in place of. A man with his arms open, seen from a distance, is a crucifix without the wood.
So the answer is both at once: the outstretched arms are an embrace, and they are a cross, and we are not meant to choose.
That double reading was in the design from the beginning, and it very nearly did not happen.
The cross that was replaced by a gesture
The first serious drawings gave Christ a large cross in one hand and a globe in the other — a figure holding the instruments of his authority, in the manner of a great deal of nineteenth-century religious sculpture.
Heitor da Silva Costa, the Brazilian engineer who led the project, went to Paris and kept sketching, and the cross and globe went away. What replaced them was the posture: nothing held, nothing carried, both hands empty and open.
The change matters more than it looks. A statue holding a cross tells us what was done to Jesus. A statue with its arms open tells us what he is doing about us, which is a different tense altogether.
How it was made, and by whom
Construction ran from 1922 to 1931, and the statue was inaugurated on 12 October 1931. It stands thirty metres tall on an eight-metre pedestal, at the top of Corcovado, seven hundred metres above the city.
The sculptor was Paul Landowski, a Frenchman of Polish descent, who worked in Paris and shipped the pieces to Brazil. The face was modelled by Gheorghe Leonida, a Romanian. The skin is soapstone — thousands of small tiles laid over reinforced concrete by hand, chosen because it is soft enough to work and durable enough to survive a century of Atlantic weather on an exposed peak.
The arms span twenty-eight metres, nearly as wide as the figure is tall. That proportion is why it reads as a cross from the water, and it is not accidental engineering. It is the whole argument of the thing.
What the open arms are usually taken to mean
Three readings have attached themselves to the gesture, and all three are defensible.
The first is welcome. Arms held out like that are what a parent does at an airport, and we all know the gesture before anybody explains it. The statue faces the city and the harbour rather than the ocean, so everyone arriving by sea arrives into that posture whether they came for it or not.
The second is blessing. The hands are open and turned slightly down, which is the shape of a hand laid on a head, multiplied until it covers a bay of six million people.
The third is the cross, which our eyes assemble on their own at any distance, and which is why the first two readings are not sentimental. The embrace and the execution are the same shape. That is not a decorative accident. It is the claim itself, in concrete: we were gathered in by the very thing that killed him.
What Scripture puts in that posture
The gesture belongs to a sentence Jesus said over Jerusalem, looking at a city that had not wanted him: how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.
It is a strange image to choose — not an eagle, not a lion, a hen — and it is a sentence spoken in grief rather than in triumph. The arms are open in it, and nobody comes.
A statue cannot say the second half of that sentence, and perhaps it should not try. But the first half is standing over Rio in reinforced concrete and a skin of soapstone, and it has stood there through a dictatorship, a democracy, and a great many nights when the city underneath it was not at peace and we were not either.
Frequently asked
What do the outstretched arms of the statue symbolize?
Welcome, blessing, and the cross. The open arms are read as an embrace of the city and of everyone arriving in it, and as a gesture of blessing over it; and because the arms span twenty-eight metres against a thirty-metre figure, the silhouette forms a cross when seen from a distance. All three readings are intended.
Where is Christ the Redeemer, and how tall is it?
On the summit of Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, about seven hundred metres above the city. The statue is thirty metres tall and stands on an eight-metre pedestal, with an arm span of twenty-eight metres.
Who built it?
The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project; the French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski made the figure; the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face. It was funded largely by donations from Brazilian Catholics and inaugurated on 12 October 1931.
Why is it made of soapstone?
Because it is soft enough to be cut into small tiles and set by hand over a concrete core, and hard-wearing enough to survive a century of wind, sun and lightning on an exposed summit. The statue is struck by lightning regularly and repaired with stone from the same quarry.
Is it the largest statue of Jesus?
No, and it has not been for some time. Several taller figures of Christ have been built since, in Poland, Bolivia, Indonesia and Mexico. Christ the Redeemer remains the most recognised, which is a different measurement.
A gesture that outlasted its argument
The statue was proposed, more than once, by people who wanted a monument to Brazilian Catholic identity at a moment when the church had just been separated from the state. There was politics in it.
The politics has gone quiet. What is left on the mountain is a figure with nothing in its hands, facing the city rather than the view, arms out in the only posture that means both come here and this is what it cost.
From the streets below it is small and white and usually half in cloud. People look up at it on ordinary mornings, on the way to work, without stopping.
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