THORVALDSEN, BERTIL. — Sculptor, b. in Copenhagen on 13 Nov. 1768, d. there on 24 March 1844. Initially a pupil of his father, then of Abildgaard and Carstens, at the age of 29 he went to Italy, first to Naples, then to Rome, where he reunited with Carstens and divided his interests between the observation, study and restoration of ancient marbles and the imitation of works by Canova.
This imitation, however, was soon translated into a deliberately polemical spirit, as if he wished to reinterpret, from time to time, Canovian themes in the light of a more orthodox faith in the principles of Winckelmann, which Canova (q.v.) often tempered. But this attitude was made evident in a Jason (1801) and in numerous images of Hebe, Venus, Cupid and Psyche, the Graces, and in the Lion at Lucerne (1820), sharpened by Thorvaldsen’s work under the constant guidance of the archaeologist and patron Zoëga, so much so that he was considered by the most intransigent neoclassicists of his time to be superior even to Canova. Thorvaldsen nonetheless possessed an undeniable, indeed exceptional, technical skill and knew every subtlety in modelling reliefs; so much so that even Canova himself, champion of the “sublime execution,” proposed him in 1811 as a teacher of sculpture at the reorganized Accademia di S. Luca.
In the same year, Thorvaldsen received from Napoleon the commission to sculpt the frieze of Alexander’s Entry into Babylon for the Throne Room of the Quirinal (a relief later repeated at Villa Carlotta on Lake Como), in which the grand motif of the Parthenon frieze is rendered with coldness and minute calculation. Subsequently, for six years Thorvaldsen worked for Prince Ludwig of Bavaria on the restoration of the sculptures from the Temple of Aegina, while also pursuing other projects such as the relief of the Three Graces, repeated in the Monument to Andrea Appiani in Milan. In 1819 he returned to his homeland for a visit and was greeted triumphantly; then, after crossing Poland and Germany, he returned to Rome laden with commissions, among which were statues and reliefs for the decoration of the Frauenkirche in Copenhagen. The plaster model for the image of the Redeemer from that series of sculptures is in Rome, in the church of SS. Luca e Martina. In it, the master’s effort to move beyond the direct imitation of an ancient model is evident, depicting Christ in a most humanly benevolent, welcoming attitude. A type not unlike that diffused by the Nazarenes (q.v.), a figure quite distinct from the toga-clad images of ancient senators and philosophers frequent in his repertoire, yet an image in which Thorvaldsen, by reason of the very cold rationality of his temperament, does not succeed in transcending the limits of his fundamentally one-sided culture.
Lesser merits are found in the monument to Pius VII in St Peter’s, where, however, the figure of the Pope is most beautiful, sombre of face and entirely absorbed in the closed gesture of blessing, and in numerous other works commissioned from Thorvaldsen by Prince Ludwig of Bavaria for German cities, among which are the Monument to Maximilian I in Munich and the Statue of Gutenberg in Mainz. Among the finest works of Thorvaldsen’s last Italian period is the small Funerary Monument to Isabella Alfani in S. Giovenale in Rieti. Meanwhile, around 1840, even in the Roman artistic milieu Thorvaldsen’s sculpture began to provoke controversy, and young artists looked rather to Tenerani, who proclaimed the masters of the Renaissance as the only true imitators of nature. Disgusted, the master wished to return to his homeland, where a museum had been built in Copenhagen to house his sculptures, but even in Denmark neoclassical taste was now waning.
Today, beyond the neoclassical and purist controversy, it can be recognised that the aspiration to Hellenic serenity, which in the best of Canova had assumed the value of an intimate process of formal refinement, for Thorvaldsen—who had little imagination—resolved itself into an academic taste for decoration conducted according to now outdated Winckelmannian principles. In his marbles, carved with impeccable and rationally impersonal technique, everything is evident and clear and rendered legible, even the rhythms ostentatiously articulated and repeated that only rarely resolve into music. In him there seems to freeze, more than the steadfastness of the North, the intransigent determinism of the Protestant. — See pl. IV.