The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is — improbably — not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954.

When a crane first heaved Pattison’s mammoth steed from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts Building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage-like midsection of pointed ribs, flat, Cubist planes, and a wavy, squared-off mane and tail. It was recognizably a horse, but it was no classical equestrian sculpture. And the artwork had many on campus seething.

Last spring, when the sculpture — briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist, but popularly known as Iron Horse — was extricated from a concrete pad in a cornfield outside Athens for conservation, it was missing 32 pieces and bore decades-deep scars of etching and graffiti, and a bullet wound in its neck. Its hooves had rusted the color of Georgia clay.

Statues on college campuses have long been lightning rods for the issues and debates coursing through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may always be a mystery.

“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original condition with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, both based in Athens. “It has this lore, it has an aura.”