The Little Mermaid

This guide to The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen traces its history of vandalism: beheaded in 1964 by an art collective, beheaded again in 1998 with the head mailed to a TV station, and doused in paint more than once over the decades. It also tells the story of Carl Jacobsen, the Carlsberg heir who commissioned the statue in 1909 after seeing a ballet of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, and the unusual arrangement behind the sculptor's model. The statue still sits on its harbor rock today, barely four feet tall.