Bertel Thorvaldsen

Biography

Thorvaldsen’s date of birth is poorly established: no birth certificate or baptismal record has been found, and the only surviving record is of his confirmation in 1787. His birthday is conventionally taken as 19 November 1770, although according to some accounts he was born in 1768. The sculptor himself celebrated a different date, 8 March, the day he arrived in Rome.

He was born in Copenhagen into a poor family. His father, Gottskálk Þorvaldsson, an Icelander, carved decorations for ships at a shipyard, and his mother was called Karen Dagnes. The Danish form of his father’s patronymic became the son’s surname. At eleven Bertel entered the Royal Danish Academy of Art: he studied drawing, from 1786 in the modelling school, and in his remaining time helped his father with wood carving. Among his teachers were Nicolai Abildgaard and Johannes Wiedewelt. In 1787 he received the small silver medal, in 1789 the large silver, in 1791 the small gold, and in 1793 the large gold for a relief, “St. Peter Healing the Cripple”. The gold medal gave him a claim to a travelling scholarship abroad, but the place was taken, and he had to wait three years. All that time he earned his living by portrait drawings, book illustrations and decorative work.

In August 1796 he received his instructions for the journey, and on 30 August he sailed on the frigate Thetis. In January 1797 he was put ashore in Palermo, travelled from there to Naples, spent a month studying the collections and arrived in Rome on 8 March. The custom of celebrating a “Roman birthday” came from Goethe, and Thorvaldsen kept to it all his life.

The first years were hard for him. Commissions were few, the captain of his ship, so the story goes, called him a lazy dog, and the impression made by the antiquities, it seems, shook his confidence. He was helped by the Danish archaeologist Georg Zoëga, who saw to it that the young sculptor learned to understand antiquity and criticised his lack of education without mercy. The drawings of Asmus Jacob Carstens gave him a great deal too: Thorvaldsen probably took the idea of “Jason” from Carstens’s “Argonauts”. The first, life-size statue was finished in clay in the spring of 1801, and he smashed it because he could not pay for a plaster cast. The cast was paid for by his friend and patron Friederike Brun, and he began again, this time larger than life. The work was finished by the end of 1802. Canova praised its “great and original style”, and Zoëga approved as well, but no buyer came forward. Thorvaldsen was packing his trunk to leave when the wealthy Englishman Thomas Hope commissioned “Jason” in marble and paid an advance. For the next sixteen years he did not leave Italy. The marble was delivered only twenty-five years later: commissions kept multiplying.

The workshop grew. He lived on the Via Sistina above the Spanish Steps and kept his studios in the stables of the Palazzo Barberini. By 1805 he had to hire assistants, who cut most of the marble and modelled the large models, while he made the sketches and the final touches. “Adonis”, for Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, begun in 1808 and delivered in 1832, he is thought to have carved almost entirely with his own hand. In 1812, for the expected visit of Napoleon, he made in a little over two months a plaster frieze of the triumph of Alexander the Great for the Quirinal Palace, about 37 metres long. In 1817–1818 his workshop restored the Aegina marbles that Ludwig had acquired: the missing arms and heads he modelled himself, and Italian craftsmen carved them in marble. Archaeologists, among them Adolf Furtwängler, later objected to this restoration.

In 1819 he came to Copenhagen. He was received as a national hero, the celebrations took up his time, and real work began only after the New Year. There he received his chief commission: Christ and the Twelve Apostles for the Church of Our Lady, rebuilt after the British bombardment of 1807. The statues were made back in Rome, and the friezes were finished in 1839–1840. Christ gave him more trouble than the others: four sketches survive, and the position of the arms tormented him most. He modelled Christ and the Apostle Paul himself; the other figures were modelled by assistants from his quick sketches. On the way back in 1820 he stopped in Warsaw and received commissions for monuments to Józef Poniatowski and Nicolaus Copernicus; they were made in 1820–1829 and 1829–1830. The same series includes Byron for Cambridge, Schiller for Stuttgart, Gutenberg for Mainz and the “Lion Monument” in Lucerne, a monument cut into the rock to the Swiss Guards who died defending the Tuileries in 1792. Neither he nor his assistant Pierre Bienaimé, who made the model, had seen a live lion.

For the Vatican he made the tomb of Pope Pius VII, the only work by a non-Catholic in St Peter’s Basilica. He was not allowed to sign it.

From 1825 he was president of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. In 1838 he returned to Denmark, and his arrival was regarded as a national event. The museum, designed by the architect Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll, was begun in 1839 and opened four years after the sculptor’s death. On 24 March 1844 he dined with Adam Oehlenschläger and Hans Christian Andersen and, so it is said, remarked that he could now die whenever the time came, since Bindesbøll had finished his tomb. Then he went to the Royal Theatre and died there. He is buried in the courtyard of the museum, under roses, as he had asked.