Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions, presenting an artwork physically in height, width, and depth. It is one of the plastic arts and originally used carving, the removal of material, and modelling, the addition of material such as clay.
The tallest sculpture on record is the Statue of Unity in India, which stands 182 metres tall and was completed in 2018. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity.
Sculpture in the round is free-standing, such as a statue not attached to any other surface except possibly at its base. Relief is at least partly attached to a background surface and is classified by its degree of projection into low or bas-relief, high relief, and sometimes mid-relief, with sunk-relief restricted to ancient Egypt.
The Lowenmensch, a 30 centimetre lion-human figure carved from woolly mammoth ivory and found in Germany, is among the oldest uncontested examples of sculpture, dated to about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. The oldest surviving metal casting is a copper Mesopotamian frog from 3200 BCE.
Creating monumental sculpture required summoning the resources to transport very heavy materials and pay full-time sculptors, which is treated as a mark of an advanced culture in social organization. Some advanced cultures such as the Indus Valley civilization appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, while ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture devoted enormous resources to large-scale work from a very early stage.
Aniconism originated with Judaism, which did not accept figurative sculpture until the 19th century, and the idea expanded into parts of Christianity and Islam. Iconoclasm of sculpture for religious motives runs from the Early Christians and the Beeldenstorm of the Protestant Reformation to the 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban.