La Ballarina is a sculpture that sits in a flower bed in the Royal Botanic Gardens. It was one of eight statues purchased for the new Palace Garden in 1883. La Ballarina was sculpted by Charles Summers, a successful Australian sculptor living in Carrara, Italy and was a copy of a work by Antonio Canova, which has since been lost. These Italian statues fell victim to changing attitudes that saw many of the more flagrant nudes removed in the 1910s and later destroyed as a 'menace to public morals'. Others were removed from public view in the 1970s when the mass replication of classical statuary in suburban gardens made the works seem 'low-brow'. The surviving statues were kept in the Stoneyard, known as the 'Graveyard', behind the Succulent Garden. La Ballarina was the first of the Italian marbles to be reconstructed with a new head, hand and foot sculpted by Polish-born mason Jacek Luszczyk from photos provided by the the Canova Foundation in Italy and unveilled in 2009.
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