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Thorswaldsen
by
He was twenty-six years of age when he sailed for Rome on the good ship “Thetis.” The scholarship he had won four years before, but through disinclination to press his claims, and the procrastination of officialism, the matter was pigeonholed. It might have gone by default had not Abildgaard said “Go!” and loudly.
Thorwaldsen was a sort of charity passenger on the ship–taken on request of the owner–and it was assumed that he would make himself useful. But the captain of the craft left him a recommendation to the effect that “The young fellow Thorwaldsen is the laziest man I ever saw.” The ship was on a trading tour, and lingered along various coasts and put into many harbors; so nine months went by before Bertel Thorwaldsen found himself in the Eternal City.
“I was born March Eighth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven,” Thorwaldsen used to say. That was the day he reached Rome. Antonio Canova, the sculptor, was then at the height of his popularity. Thorwaldsen’s first success was the model for a statue of Jason, which was highly praised by Canova, and Bertel received the commission to execute it in marble from Thomas Hope, a wealthy English art patron. From this time forth, Thorwaldsen’s success was assured.
His scholarship provided only for three years’ residence; but twenty-three years were to elapse before he should again see his childhood’s home–as for his parents, he had looked into their eyes for the last time.
The soul grows by leaps and bounds, by throes and throbs. A flash! and a glory stands revealed for which you have been groping blindly through the years. Well did Thorwaldsen call the day of his arrival in Rome the day of his birth! For the first time the world seemed to unfold before him. On the voyage thither, the captain of the “Thetis” had offered to prepare him for his stay in Rome by teaching him the Italian language; but the young sculptor was indifferent. During the months he was on shipboard, he might have mastered the language; this came back to him as he stood in the presence of Saint Peter’s, and realized that he was treading the streets once trod by Michelangelo. He spoke only “Sailor’s Latin,” a composite of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The waste of time of which he had been guilty, and the extent of all that lay beyond, pressed home upon him.
Of course we know that the fallow years are as good as the years of plenty; the silent Winter prepares the soil for Spring; and we know, too, that the sense of unworthiness and the discontent that Thorwaldsen felt during his first few weeks at Rome were big with promise.
The antique world was a new world to him; he knew nothing of mythology, nothing of history, little of books. He began to thirst for knowledge, and this being true, he drank it in. Little men spell things out with sweat and lamp-smoke, but others there be who absorb in the mass, read by the page, and grow great by simply letting down their buckets.
This fair-haired descendant of a Viking bold had the usual preliminary struggle, for the Established Order is always resentful toward pressing youth. He worked incessantly: sketched, read, studied, modeled, and to help out his finances copied pictures for prosperous dealers who made it their business thus to employ ‘prentice talent.
But a few years and we see Thorwaldsen occupying the studio of Flaxman, and more than filling that strong man’s place. For specimens of Flaxman’s work examine your “Wedgwood”; and then to see Thorwaldsen’s product, multiply Flaxman by one hundred. One worked in the delicate and exquisite; the other had a taste for the heroic: both found inspiration in the Greek.
It will not do to claim for Thorwaldsen that he was a great and original genius. He lacked that hirsute, independent quality of Michelangelo, and surely he lacked the Attic invention. He was receptive as a woman, and he builded on what had been done. He moved in the line of least resistance–made friends of Protestant and Catholic alike; won the warm recognition of the Pope, who averred, “Thorwaldsen is a good Catholic, only he does not know it.” He kept clear of all factions, and with a modicum more of will, might have been a very prince of diplomats. But as it was, he evolved into a prince of artists.