We all carry hidden cities inside our head and among the places that feel like a place of belonging are a city’s museums and art galleries. One can spend hours in a museum surveying, exploring and scrutinising the wonders that it has to offer. Suddenly, it’s closing time and one realises that a return to the tumult in the streets is approaching.
In the summer of 2012 a visit to the oldest art gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Thorvaldsens Museum was met with great enthusiasm. The sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was the most famous Dane in the first half of the 19th century and is among the best known Danish artists of all time.
This is the oldest art gallery in Denmark, having opened on September 18, 1848. This museum on Slotsholmen, next door to Christiansborg, houses the greatest collection of the works of Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), the biggest name in neoclassical sculpture. Thorvaldsen’s life represented the romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries: He rose from semi-poverty to the pinnacle of success in his day. He is famous for his most typical, classical, restrained works, taken from mythology: Cupid and Psyche, Adonis, Jason, Hercules, Ganymede, Mercury — all of which are displayed at the museum.
Erected in 1839–48 from designs by Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll. It was built to house the collection of sculpture that the celebrated Danish Neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen presented to his native country in 1837.
