Sculpture and architecture belong together. We see this in the courthouse, at Madison Avenue and 25th Street, of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.

We credit this building, completed in 1899, to architect James Brown Lord, whose social pedigree included relations to both the Browns of Brown Brothers and the Lords of Lord, Day & Lord. While his basic scheme for the building is admirable, it is the sculpture that captivates attention.

Through the offices of the National Sculpture Society, a Who’s Who of American sculptors participated in the building’s embellishment. The long main facade is on 25th Street. The entrance stairs are flanked by large seated figures in marble (like all the building’s sculpture) by Frederick Ruckstull, the implacable foe of Modernist art. One figure, a warrior, represents Force; the other, an old, bearded man, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Medici Moses, represents Wisdom. Our attention is impelled upward, however, to the attic, where we find seven statues and a central group, “Justice,” by Daniel Chester French (who maintained a studio a block away in the old Madison Square Garden).

The statues are of great legislators of history. Lest one think multiculturalism a recent thing, think again. From the western edge to the central group range four figures: Zoroaster, Alfred the Great, Lycurgus, and Solon. On the other side of the Justice group, from left to right, stand Louis XIII, Manu (the lone mythological figure), and Justinian. On the far right is an empty plinth. Once, a statue of Mohammed occupied it. In 1955, the state removed the statue. Why? Muslim nations had requested the removal. Though the statue was meant to honor the tradition of Islamic law, Islam is an iconoclastic religion that forbids representations of Mohammed. Why the Brooklyn Museum has never been asked to remove its attic statue of Mohammed I can’t say.

The narrow side of the building faces across Madison Avenue to Madison Square. The building’s most visible side, it is as richly embellished as the main facade. The at tic features a central group called “Peace,” by Karl Bitter. Flanking it are figures of Moses and Confucius.

A different American sculptor designed each of the statues. For example, Edward Clark Potter created Zoroaster; the same sculptor gave us the lions in front of the New York Public Library. George Bissell did Lycurgus, which he must have worked on at the same time as on his Chester Arthur statue, right across in Madison Square. Philip Martiny, one of the best architectural sculptors in America (responsible for the “cherub staircase” in the Library of Congress) created Confucius.

The building has it all. The attic statuary makes the building more truly Palladian than 99% of the buildings so called. Sculpture fills the pediment on 25th Street, figures flank the entrance, figures fill the spandrels, and caryatids (“The Four Seasons”) enliven the 25th Street side – the panoply of sculptural effects in a city where this is too seldom the case.