At the 2011 Venice Biennale, in one of the spacious rooms of the Arsenale, Urs Fischer presented his most monumental ‘candle’: a 1:1 wax replica of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women(c. 1580), a Mannerist masterpiece which, standing over four metres tall, is still to be found under the righthand arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria.

Fischer's choice was very fitting. Giambologna had shown proof of great technical virtuosity by carving his complex dynamic sculpture group from a single block of marble. And despite what legends say, not even the ancients had achieved so much. What's more, the sculpture was conceived in such a way as to be viewed from more than one standpoint, giving the impression of closing in on itself in an upwards spiral motion like a twisted column and encouraging the viewer to walk around it. Giambologna's skill in treating marble to make it look like malleable material is unprecedented: some bodily details of the three figures (a young woman raised by a man and an older man who crouches beneath them) are so life-like that they seem shaped in wax rather than carved from marble. Only Bernini would achieve comparable effects when representing Proserpina and her abductor, Pluto, in the Rape of Proserpina(1621).

Two other circumstances might have influenced Fischer's decision to take the Rape of the Sabine Womenas a theme and a model.