I just saw “The Pianist” last night - it was the free movie on campus. At least three times during the course of the movie, there was a shot of Warsaw with a statue in the foreground. By the end, the statue had been knocked over and was on the ground. I looked around on the google, but all I could find was a Copernicus statue that doesn’t really look like the same one. Does anyone know what that statue is/was? Watching the movie, I felt like I was expected to recognize it.
(I thought about putting this in Cafe Society, but it seems like more of a Warsaw question than a question about the movie.)
I’ve seen the film and don’t specifically remember it being shown, but the other famous statue in Warsaw is that of Sigismund III in the square outside the Castle. It’s atop a narrow column and is basically a guy with a big cross. The Rough Guide to Poland notes that it was felled by a shot from a tank in September 1944. This is collaborated by the more authoritive Katalog Zabytkow Sztuki, Miastro Warszawa, Stare Miastro (Ilustracje, Warsaw, 1993, Fig. 582 - the Tekst volume presumably has more detail, but I don’t know Polish), which notes that it was reconstructed in 1948-9.
As an aside on the Copernicus statue, the Warsaw Historical Museum still has the inflamatory plaque the Germans attached to it, asserting that he was German rather than Polish.