One Sculptor's Reading, Repeated for a Century

The specific image members now recognize did not exist from the church's earliest years; it developed gradually as temple building resumed after the pioneers reached Utah. The Salt Lake Temple, completed after forty years of construction, was the first to carry the figure when it was dedicated in 1893, its statue sculpted by Cyrus Dallin, an artist who was not himself a Latter-day Saint and who researched the commission largely from written descriptions rather than any established church iconography, since none yet existed. Dallin's original design set the template later sculptors would keep returning to: a standing robed figure, one arm raised, a long trumpet lifted to the lips as though about to sound.

Later twentieth-century temples mostly used newer versions cast for mass production in fiberglass and later gold leaf over metal rather than carved individually, which let the church place a version of the same figure atop dozens of temples built during its fastest period of expansion from the 1980s onward. Some regional variations exist, including temples where the statue faces a specific direction for local symbolic reasons, but the basic silhouette, an upright herald with a raised trumpet, has stayed close to Dallin's original reading of the story for well over a century.