We don't have the pieces of the colossus at Rhodes anymore because an invading army sold him for scrap in 654AD. He only stood for a bit over 60 years before he was toppled by an earthquake but the pieces of him were there for over 800 years.
What's interesting to me about the colossus is that it was a statue of Helios. Most of the ancient Greek world wasn't super into Helios but the island of Rhodes was. He was their guy. So with their winnings from a battle they opted to build a gigantic statue of Helios. Can you imagine the sheer terror everyone must've felt while an earthquake was leveling their homes around them and in the distance is a gigantic crash and possible deafening gong noise from the gigantic statue of the sun god toppling to the earth?
That thing was about the size of the statue of liberty without the pedestal. That's part of the reason she's called the new Colossus. That and her spiked crown. Helios was almost always sculpted with bronze spikes around his head so it wouldn't have made sense for the colossus to not have those.
We don't have an ancient depiction of the colossus but we do know that he didn't straddle the harbor. That makes no sense and he wasn't tall enough for that anyways. Most likely he looked something like this drawing by Pedro Rafael Mena:
Or perhaps like this older illustration:
When thinking about scale, he was roughly the same size as the statue of liberty. Probably a bit shorter but comparable to its scale.
For scale, there's a protestor standing at her base. The colossus was roughly the same size as that, all the way back in 282BC.



















