The story
Walk round the outside of the Thorvaldsen Museum on Slotsholmen, the palace island in central Copenhagen, and you are reading a procession. A long frieze by the painter Jørgen Sonne shows the day in 1838 when the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen came home from Rome after some 40 years away, met by crowds at the harbour.
He returned as one of the most celebrated sculptors in Europe, and Copenhagen had already raised money by public subscription for a museum to hold his work. The architect Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll gave it Greek and Egyptian echoes, strong colours and a different painted ceiling in every room. Thorvaldsen died in 1844, four years before it opened, and he is buried in its inner courtyard.
Inside are his marbles and, above all, his plaster models, the full-size originals from which marble and bronze versions went out to churches and squares across Europe. Among them is Jason with the Golden Fleece, the figure that first made his name in Rome.
Thorvaldsen was a collector as well. He brought home antiquities and a large collection of paintings, by artists he had known in Rome and by younger Danes. That is why a quiet landscape by the Danish painter Johan Lundbye, a burial mound at Raklev on Refsnæs painted in 1839, hangs in a sculptor's museum.
