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The bronze is 2.5 centimetres thick and weighs 3,200 kilograms. You can't cast a thing this size as a single piece — no foundry's kiln takes three tonnes of molten metal in one pour, and no mould this large lets bronze cool evenly. So Arturo Di Modica did it in sections, at Bedi-Makky Art Foundry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — the family shop that had cast the U.S. Marines' Iwo Jima Memorial four decades earlier. Lost-wax casting, French sand moulds, one slab of muscle at a time.

Side-on, the proportions read true. 3.4 metres at the shoulder. 4.9 metres nose to tail. Heavier than a Manhattan delivery truck, low enough that tourists climb on its back for the photo. Di Modica wanted the silhouette of an animal mid-charge — not a monument — and the choice of pose forced everything else: a heavy front quarter, a planted hind, the centre of gravity dropped forward.

Close up, the seams give the casting away — faint lines along the ribs where the sections were welded and hand-finished, the bronze ground down for months until the joints read as skin. Above them, patina rubbed bright at the horns and the nose. Below, cobblestones polished to glass under the front hooves. Fifty thousand pairs of hands a day, year after year, wearing the bronze smoother than its sculptor ever could.

Head-on, the pose is borrowed — from the Spanish bronzes Di Modica grew up around in Sicily, and from the encierro bulls of Pamplona he watched on television: head down, weight shifted forward, the half-second before contact. It is an attack pose, not a heraldic one. Sculpted for the moment after the hoof leaves the ground.

From behind, the bull is tail and rump and the back arched for the strike. The bronze is polished here too — by tourists who can't resist photographing the only angle no postcard was supposed to show. Surveys put it as New York's second-most photographed sculpture, behind the Statue of Liberty. Some of the smoothest spots aren't the horns or the nose: it's the back of the hind legs, worn shiny where people lean for balance while reaching for the genitals for luck.