THORVALDSEN, BERTEL. — Sculptor, born in Copenhagen on 13 November 1768, died there on 24 March 1844. First a pupil of his father, then of Abilgaard and Carstens, at the age of twenty-nine he went to Italy, first to Naples, then to Rome, where, having found Carstens again, he divided his interests between the observation, study, and restoration of ancient marbles and the imitation of Canova’s works.
An imitation, however, immediately translated into a deliberate polemical spirit, as though he wished, each time, to re-propose Canovian themes in the light of a more orthodox adherence to the principles of Winckelmann, Canova (v.). Yet it was this attitude, evident in a Jason (1801) and in numerous images of Hebe, Venus, Cupid and Psyche, the Graces, and in the Lion that is in Lucerne (1820), sharpened by T.’s work under the constant guidance of the archaeologist and patron Zoega, that led the most uncompromising neoclassical critics of his time to consider him superior even to
Canova. In any case, T. possessed an undeniable, indeed exceptional, technical ability and knew every subtlety of modelling reliefs; hence it is not surprising that Canova himself, also an advocate of “sublime execution,” proposed him in 1811 as a teacher of sculpture at the reorganized Accademia di S. Luca.
In the same year T. received from Napoleon the commission to sculpt the frieze with the Entry of Alexander into Babylon for the Throne Room of the Quirinal (the relief was later repeated in Villa Carlotta on Lake Como), where nothing less than the great motif of the Parthenon frieze is taken up with coldness and meticulous calculation. Subsequently, for six years T. worked on behalf of Prince Ludwig of Bavaria on the restoration of the sculptures of the temple of Aegina, while pursuing other undertakings, such as the relief with the Three Graces repeated in the Monument to Andrea Appiani in Milan. Having left in 1819 to revisit his homeland, he received triumphant welcomes there; then, travelling through Poland and Germany, he returned to Rome laden with commissions, among them that for the statues and reliefs for the decoration of the Frauenkirche in Copenhagen. The plaster model of the image of the Redeemer from that series of sculptures is in Rome, in the church of SS. Luca e Martina. In it T.’s effort to dispense with the direct imitation of an ancient model is evident, representing Christ in a profoundly human, benevolent, welcoming attitude. A type not unlike that disseminated by the “Nazarenes” (v.), a figure clearly distinct from the toga-clad images of ancient senators and philosophers frequent in his repertory, and yet an image in which T., because of the same coldly reasoning quality of his temperament, fails to transcend the limits of his fundamentally one-sided culture.
Lesser merits are discernible in the monument to Pius VII in S. Pietro, where, however, the figure of the Pontiff is exceedingly beautiful, sombre of countenance and wholly gathered into the closed gesture of blessing, and in numerous other works commissioned from T. by Prince Ludwig of Bavaria for the German cities, among which are the Monument to Maximilian I, in Munich, and the Statue of Gutenberg in Mainz. Among the finest works of T.’s final Italian period must be placed the small Funerary Monument of Isabella Alfani in S. Giovenale in Rieti. Meanwhile, around 1840, T.’s sculpture also began to provoke controversy in the Roman artistic milieu, and the young artists looked rather to Tenerani, who proclaimed the masters of the Renaissance to be the sole imitators of “true nature.” Disgusted, the master wished to return to his homeland, where a museum had been built in Copenhagen to house his sculptures, but by then even in Denmark the neoclassical taste was approaching its decline.
Today, beyond the neoclassical and purist controversy, it can be recognized that the aspiration to Hellenic serenity, which in the best Canova had assumed the value of an intimate process of formal refinement, was transformed, in T., who possessed little imagination, into a taste for decoration carried out according to by then antiquated Winckelmannian principles. In his marbles, carved with impeccable technique and a reasoning impersonality, everything is evident and clear and rendered legible, including the ostentatiously marked and reiterated rhythms that only very rarely resolve themselves into music. In him, it seems to be the uncompromising determinism of the Protestant, rather than Nordic firmness, that brings on the frost. — Vedi tav. IV.