Shelley's subtext is arguably that art survives, even when men and their "power" do not. Everything else has disappeared, but a piece of sculpture, though a ruin, still exists in this vast empty space devoid of anything else. Were it not for the artist who created that statue, there would be no evidence at all of Ozymandias.

The concept that art endows its subject with meaning is a trope that has been a constant of literary history. With a kind of transferred pride, Shelley has the traveler note that

. . . its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things . . .

By depicting the tyrant, the artist has demonstrated his superiority to him. Shelley identifies with the artist of the remote past. It is not merely that an individual artwork survives but that the practice of the arts over the millennia has been maintained. Shelley's poem itself is an analogue to the statue. Just as the sculptor of antiquity created a "record" of his time, Shelley memorialized his own age. "Ozymandias" can be seen as a symbol of the transitory nature of power and command in the early nineteenth century, when much of the old order was swept aside by Napoleon, and Napoleon himself was swept away, just like Ozymandias.