statua

Statua, statuae, f., first declension, from statuo, "to set up": a thing stood upright, and specifically a standing figure of a human being.

Latin is precise about which image word to use. A god gets a simulacrum or a signum, a dead ancestor an imago, and a statua honours a living or recently living man - which made putting one up a political act with a vote of the senate or the town council behind it, and made pulling one down an equally deliberate one. English statue arrives through French; statute, from statutum, is the same verb's other child and means a thing laid down rather than set up, which is why the two are so easy to confuse in writing and never in sense.