The chocolate statue of the pope weighs how much?

Factual Questions
1

So Pope Francis was recently given a “life-size” sculpture of himself made out of chocolate by the Accademia of Maestri Cioccolatieri, near Venice. (This happened back in February, but I’ve only just seen the reports about it.) Here are some reports about it.

The reports variously state that the sculpture was made from a 1.5-tonne block of chocolate, or from 1.5 tonnes of cocoa. All say, and the pictures bear this out, that it is life-size.

It seems to me that there is a disparity between its size and weight.

Let’s assume that Francis weighs 100 kg. (I couldn’t find his height in a quick Google search, and I’m guessing he actually weighs less than that, but it’s a nice round number.) The human body has a density slightly less than that of water. Cite. Chocolate is slightly more dense than water. Cite. (PDF!)

But the statue, at 1,500 kg, and roughly the same volume as the pope, weighs 15 times as much. How?

Okay, so one part of the solution is that the sculpture shows him in robe-like vestments that extend to the ground, taking up much more volume than a likeness of the naked pope would. (Sorry for that image.) But let’s say that doubles the volume. We still have to find more mass.

I thought that maybe the solution was in the claims that it was made from 1.5 tonnes of cocoa. If you have to start with a 5 kg of cocoa beans to end up with 1 kg of chocolate, that might explain it (and the reports that said it *weighed *1.5 tonnes were wrong). But here’s a cite that says that because you add sugar, milk, and other ingredients to chocolate, basically one kilo of beans makes one kilo of chocolate, regardless of how sweet or bitter it is.

Another possibility is that they had to waste a fair amount of material in the process of sculpting it. I doubt that they started with a large rectangular block and cut away everything that didn’t look like Francis, but would that account for all the missing mass?

Looking at it from the other direction, at 1300 kg/m[sup]3[/sup], 1.5 tonnes of chocolate makes a cube about 1.14 meters on a side. Does that sculpture look like it contains that much material to you? I suppose it’s possible, but something seems wrong to me.

What do you think?

2

The human body contains many hollows spaces (e.g. lungs, stomach, bladder), while a chocolate version would be solid there.

The same applies to clothing. flowing sleeves and robes will have space between the fabric and the body, not so with the chocolate version. The hat in particular probably ways several lbs more than it’s real life counterpart.

3

Yes, that’s undoubtedly part of it.

Didn’t look at the pictures, did you? :wink: (He’s wearing a yarmulke-type skull cap.)

4

So who wants a piece?

5

Always start with the ears.

6

Okay, let’s start with a cube of solid chocolate that’s 1.14 meters (almost 45 inches) on a side. Cut it in half in one direction and place one on top of the other. Now you have a block that’s 1.14 m wide, 2.28 m tall, and 0.57 m thick. (45 x 90 x 22.5 inches).

I don’t think Francis (or the statue) is anything close to six feet tall, much less seven and a half. And I don’t think that he’s more than a meter wide or half a meter thick. It seems to me that the volume of the statue can’t even be half the volume of a 1.5-tonne mass of the densest chocolate on the list I linked to above, if that much.

Where’s the missing chocolate? Have you guys been eating Francis when no one was looking?

7

Yeah I missed the links to pictures. After looking at them, I’d say the lower half (from the waist down) of the dummy probably has 2-3x the mass of the human version. There could also be a base underneath the silver cloth.

And speaking of cloth, that’s another thing that’s gonna be far heavier in chocolate. an interlaced net of threads vs. a solid sheet.

8

coomasense up until the shoulders that statue looks more than a meter wide.

9

There’s no way the statue is 1.5 tons, but it might well have been carved from a 1.5 ton block.

10

Mmmmm. Chocolate mass. I might convert.

11

I think you’re overestimating. I’m an average-sized man: 5’ 10" (1.78 m), and my shoulders are about 20-21 inches (53 cm) wide.

I think the real Francis is shorter than me, although maybe, just maybe, the statue is a little larger than life. But, comparing it to the people in the pictures, I can’t see how any part of it, including the base, could be as wide as a meter.

12

Even that would imply a LOT of waste.

For a comparison, a few years back somebody did a life size chocolate statue of Elton John. That is described here as 126 kg:

Granted, Francis is sculpted wearing a more loosely fitting clothes, but there’s no way I could believe of factor of any greater than twice the Elton John statue.

13

The world’s largest chocolate bar apparently is 224 inches long by 110 inches wide by 10 inches thick, and weighs 9702 pounds.

That converts to about 4 cubic meters of volume at a weight of nearly 5 tons.

If Pope Francis were a cylinder with a height of 2 meters and a radius of 1/2 meter, then his volume would be about 1.57 cubic meters.

4/1.57 approximately equals 2.55. So the chocolate popecylinder should weigh about 1/2.55 of the weight of the chocolate megabar, or about 1.96 tons.

While the hypothesized popecylinder is unquestionably larger than the actual finished ChocoPope statue, I can see how the latter might plausibly have required a 1.5-ton block of chocolate to start with.

14

Maybe Elton John is partially hollow?

15

Maybe that was just a chocolate-covered Elton John.

16

Don’t forget that a ton is 2,000 pounds (909 kg) and a tonne is 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg). That means Kimstu’s 1.96-ton cylinder is about 1.7 tonnes.

But I agree with yabob: either they wasted 25-50% of the material they started with, or the numbers are just wrong.

17

Even taking into account all the hollow spaces, the average human body is just slightly buoyant with lungs full and just slightly less than buoyant with lungs empty which means the average density is pretty much the same was water.