Constantin Hansen

Constantin Hansen owed his given name to a small corner of musical history. He was born in Rome in 1804, the son of a Danish portrait painter, and his godmother at the christening was Constanze Mozart, the widow of the composer. He was named after her, and within his first year the family carried him home to Copenhagen.

He grew up to become one of the painters of the Golden Age of Danish art, drawn to classical subjects and clear southern light. On a long stay in Italy he painted a group of his friends lounging in a Roman apartment, the smoke of a shared pipe hanging in the air, a warm record of the young Danes who had come south to study together.

His most public work came later, a large canvas of the assembly that met at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen in 1848 to write Denmark's first constitution. He spent years fitting its dozens of separate likenesses into a single room, each man a recognizable portrait.