THORVALDSEN, BERTEL. - Sculptor, b. in Copenhagen on 13 Nov. 1768, d. there on 24 March 1844. First a pupil of his father, then of Abilgaard and of Carstens, at the age of 29 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 the works of Canova.
An imitation, however, immediately translated with a deliberately polemical spirit, as though he wished to set before us again, one by one, the Canovan themes in the light of a more orthodox faith in the principles of Winckelmann, very often tempered by Canova (v.). But it was this attitude of his, evident in a Jason (1801) and in numerous images of Hebe, of Venus, of Cupid and Psyche, of the Graces, and in the Lion that is in Lucerne (1820), made sharper by T.'s working under the constant guidance of the archaeologist and patron Zoega, that led the most intransigent neoclassical critics of his time to consider him superior to Canova himself.
T. possessed in any case an undeniable, indeed exceptional, technical ability and knew every subtlety in modelling reliefs; hence there is no cause for wonder that Canova himself, an exalter of "sublime execution," proposed him, in 1811, as a teacher of sculpture in the reorganized Academy of St. Luke.
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 (a relief later repeated in the Villa Carlotta on Lake Como), in which nothing less than the great motif of the Parthenon frieze is taken up with coldness and minute calculation. Subsequently for six years T. worked on behalf of Prince Louis of Bavaria on the restoration of the sculptures of the temple of Aegina, while he carried forward other undertakings such as the relief with the Three Graces repeated in the Monument to Andrea Appiani in Milan. Having gone in 1819 to revisit his homeland, he received triumphal welcomes there; then, through Poland and Germany, he returned to Rome laden with commissions, among them that of the statues and reliefs for the decoration of the Frauenkirche in Copenhagen. The plaster of the image of the Redeemer from that series of sculptures is in Rome in the church of Sts. Luke and Martina. In it the master's effort to dispense with the direct imitation of an ancient model is evident, depicting Christ in a most humanly benevolent, welcoming attitude. A type not unlike that spread by the "Nazarenes" (v.), a figure clearly distinct from the togate images of ancient senators and philosophers frequent in his repertoire, and yet an image in which T., by the very ratiocinating coldness of his temperament, fails to go beyond the limits of his fundamentally one-sided culture.
Lesser merits are to be found in the monument to Pius VII in St. Peter's, where nevertheless the figure of the Pontiff is very beautiful, gloomy in countenance and wholly gathered into the closed gesture of blessing, and in numerous other works commissioned from T. by Prince Louis of Bavaria for the German cities, among which are remembered the Monument to Maximilian I that is in Munich, and the Statue of Gutenberg in Mainz. Among the finest works of T.'s last Italian period is to be placed the small funerary Monument of Isabella Alfani in St. Juvenal's in Rieti. Meanwhile, around 1840, even in the Roman artistic milieu T.'s sculpture began to arouse polemics, and the young looked rather to Tenerani, who proclaimed the masters of the Renaissance the only imitators of "true nature." Disgusted, the master wished to return to his homeland, where in Copenhagen a museum had been built to house his sculptures, but by now even in Denmark neoclassical taste was on the wane.
Today, outside the neoclassical and purist polemic, one can recognize that the aspiration to Hellenic serenity, which in the best Canova had taken on the value of an intimate process of formal decantation, for T., who had little imagination, resolved itself into a superficial taste for decoration carried out according to now antiquated Winckelmannian principles. In his marbles, sculpted with impeccable technique and ratiocinating impersonality, everything is evident and clear and made legible, even the ostentatiously scanned and reiterated rhythms that only very rarely resolve into music. In him there seems to freeze, more than Nordic firmness, the intransigent determinism of the Protestant. - See pl. IV.
Bibliography3 works
Emilio Lavagnino