The artist worked on this sculpture for many years until the last months of his life, losing strength due to an increasingly severe illness. He carved in marble, a block of which he personally selected in 1962 in the Estremos quarries in Portugal. He initially intended to realise it in granite, in connection with a later abandoned commission for a church in Michigan, USA. From 1962, the concept crystallised around the motif of the Ascension. Among other things, two heads of the apostles were created separately carved from the same marble. The sculpture was the ultimate manifesto of the idea of 'taille directe' (direct forging), to which Zamoyski had also devoted numerous statements and theoretical formulations since the interwar period. He regarded personal work in marble as a search for transcendent values, with a philosophical and religious dimension. The work constituted Zamoyski's creative testament, and he mentioned it many times in his correspondence from the 1960s. In a letter dated 31 March 1969, he wrote:

. "I would like to express the tragic loneliness of those people who seem to be abandoned (by the Creator) because they do not yet feel transcendental (metaphysical) values as they did at Emmaus. The apostles are desperately caught up in the hovering figure of the Master".

The religious theme is not treated traditionally here; rather, the sculptor refers to it only to undertake a fundamental reflection. The repeated hesitations and changes in artistic conception also resulted from this approach, in which, among other things, inspiration was seen in the late work of Michelangelo. Zamoyski's use of the phrase 'liberation' should probably be understood not only in a religious and existential sense, but also in a technical sense.

The work was never completed, and in its figurative aspect it is almost illegible; moreover, it differs significantly (also due to its material) from Zamoyski's other recent works. The sculpture remained wrapped up for years in the atelier in Saint-Clar, hence its almost pristine state of preservation (with even the orientation marks for the forging visible). As a bequest from General Peltier, brother of Helène Zamoyski, the sculptor's wife who died in 2012, the sculpture was donated by him to the municipality and the school bearing the artist's name. It was unveiled in front of the entrance to the kindergarten in this complex on 1 April 2014.