skulptaĵo

The suffix is doing all the work. Skulpti is the verb, to carve or model, and -aĵ- turns an action into the concrete THING that results from it. So a skulptaĵo is a carved object, exactly as a manĝaĵo is a thing eaten and a konstruaĵo a thing built. The rest of the family follows without a dictionary: skulptado is sculpting as an activity, skulptisto the person who does it, skulptarto the art form. Only the verb root had to be borrowed. Note that skulpti itself sits just past the 3,000 mark and has no page here yet, which is the odd position of a base root that is rarer in text than its own derivative.

Where it stops and statuo starts. A statuo at 1,690 is a figure: a person or an animal, standing, usually recognisable as somebody. A skulptaĵo is any piece of sculpture, and the category is wider in every direction - a relief, a bust, an abstract lump of bronze, a carving on a door. Every statuo is a skulptaĵo; almost nothing else in a modern gallery is a statuo. Reach for the general word when you are not sure, because skulptaĵo is never wrong about a statue and statuo is often wrong about sculpture.

Materials give you the compounds free. Marmora skulptaĵo, ligna skulptaĵo, glacia skulptaĵo - the adjective simply goes in front, and Esperanto never needed a separate word for a wood-carving. Skulptaĵeto is a small one, and skulptaĵaro a collection of them, which is how a museum's holdings get described in one word.