BOOKS.
THORVALDSEN.* 'ONE of the most acute of living critics has thought it no paradox to close a series of essays on the bast secondary work produced in the Renaissance of Art by a study of the life and writings of Wine- .kelmann. He has chosen this man, a Greek born out of his due time, with whom to close his survey of the Neo-pagan spirit that sprang up at the time of the Reformation. Yet it hardly seems correct to class the great student of Greece with the effete and affected artists that had for a century and more represented the fading spirit of the Renaissance ; it is not easy to say in what way Winckelmann followed or continued the work of Guido or Albano. Rather should we claim for him the prouder name of founder, of creator, of the man to whom it is due that modern art has re- covered in some measure the freshness and splendour of natural beauty ; not the last of an old school, but the first of a new one, -we will call him, and if it be so, not one of his followers more fully executed his plans, or more zealously furthered his principle, than the Danish sculptor who was born just two years after Winckel- enann's tragical end.
Thirteen years younger than Canova, and five years older than Turner, Thorvaldeen took a central position among the men who were regenerating art by an appeal to antiquity and to nature. The years just preceding the close of the seventeenth century were full of reactionary forces that were driving men's thoughts back on the earliest civilisations of the world. The new republics were -eager to emulate the free commonwealths of early times, and to assimilate to themselves all the best instincts and impulses of nature. In literature, the Romantic School all over Europe was sending the poets and the novelists to nature for their pictures and ideas, and shattering only too rudely the literature of Dresden -china and faience la TVatteau that had just preceded it. In the plastic arts the same revolutionary current flowed towards Greece ; the works of Winckehnann had only very slowly passed outside the narrow circle of antiquarian readers, and one by one the artists that were scarcely born when he died were being the first to reap where he had planted. In sculpture Canova came first, a weak harbinger of the new dawn, dimly moved by a love of what was great in ancient sculpture, but bowed down with triviality and affectation, and spoiled by an inherent effeminacy of intellect. It is difficult to tell at once why Canova's seemingly faultless statues fail to give us pleasure ; a little reflection shows ns that it is because the secondary elements of beauty have always been uppermost in his mind,—that what is bland, and soft, and pretty has always been of primary interest to him. His male figures are either absurd dandies or mawkish youths, that are paralleled in no epoch of Greek art save the latest. Even his rounded and sentimental women have something affected and un- real about them. It was in 1803, when Winckelmann had been dead for nearly forty years, that the first genuine and satisfactory outcome of his teaching appeared. In that year Berthel Thor- valdsen, half-starving and wholly despairing, put the finishing touches to that model of the " Jason " which was about to make a
• Thornalchen: Ms Ltfe and Works. By Eugbne Plou. Tranalated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. London : Bentley.
name for him throughout Europe, and be the forerunner of splendid fame and fortune.
How sublime is the contour of this gigantic figure! fn. the first full glory of manhood, supple and yet firm-set, in an attitude that reveals the easy play of the nervous, muscular frame, in its elation and easy confidence, the young Greek steps forward with the Fleece upon his arm, and his lance lightly raised in the other hand, fresh from the slaughter of the terrible dragon. The struggle has hardly sufficed to stir the heroic face ; the head, lightly poised, turns slightly on the broad, sinewy neck, with a scornful glance at the writhing mass of coils that huddle, quiver- ing, somewhere out of sight. The greatest painter of that day treated a closely similar subject about the same time, and in the same intensely modern or intensely antique fashion. Turner, in his "Apollo slaying the Python," has given us the radiant god, enveloped in his own effulgence, calmly shooting his darts into the vast snaky horror whose wounded coils stare us in the face. In Thorvaldsen, all has been concentrated in the calm, virile majesty of the slayer ; in Turner, the sentiments of natural scenery, the dark valley of rocks, the horrible solitude, the stunted foliage, are insisted on ; but in each case the inspiration is the same ; Greece, humanity, and nature have been the teachers; and to one who looks beneath the surface, there is more inherent sympathy between these two apparently so dissimilar works, than between the most grandiose figures of the sculptor-pupils of Le Brun and the simple statues of Thorvaldeen.
Thorvaldsen was a great plastic thinker. His extreme fecundity of idea interfered to some extent with his perfection of perform- ance. It is known that he seldom had the patience to follow out his ideas in marble ; sometimes he did no more than touch up the salient points in the outline, when his pupils had finished the marble to their own satisfaction. It was in a measure true what the jealous Swedish sculptors, Fogelberg and Bystrom, said, he did not rightly know how to handle the chisel. This indeed he did know ; his "Adonis," in the Glyptotek at Munich, which he cut every line of himself, proves that the chisel was perfectly at his command ; still it was rarely that he exercised his talent, and doubtless if he had been willing to sacrifice fecundity to perfection, we ehould now possess more splendid, though far fewer, works from his hands. Hie answer to Bystrom's taunt is characteristic. "Tie my hands," he said, "behind my back, and give me a block of Parian, and I will bite out of it with my teeth a finer statue than Bystrom can cut with his chisel." It is owing to this im- patience, doubtless, that there is often so much more force and freshness about the plaster than the marble, in his figures. The soul of Thorvaldsen shines out of the clay, and therefore it is at Copenhagen, and there only, that this master can be studied. In the Museum dedicated to Thorvaldsen in that city one stands among the mouldings of the artist's own hands, and one learns there to understand something of that intellect and imagination that has not been approached among sculptors since Michel Angelo walked the earth, and in the more harmonious qualities of pure beauty, not since the palmy days of Phidias himself.
This new biography of Thorvaldsen, a sumptuous volume, trans- lated from the French of an author who has followed with the patient enthusiasm of a disciple every vestige of the subject of his admiration, will tell the story of his life, picturesque in some of its details, simple and serene as a whole, to many who are not yet acquainted with it. It is full of quaint anecdotes that lose nothing of their piquancy by the rather naive way in which they have been rendered. Mrs. Hoey has done her share of the work very creditably ; her English is easy and flowing, and when one recol- lects that a considerable portion of the book has been translated originally from Danish into French, and then again into English, it is surprising that the style is so pleasant and intelligible as it is. The volume is adorned with tw.o very delicate engravings on cop- per, one of the "Venus Triumphant.," modelled in 1805; the other of the "Hermes Argus-bane "—as an Icelander would say— Mercury taking the syrinx from his lips, while he draws his sword along his thigh, before thrusting it into the spell-bound Argus. On the whole, perhaps this is Thorvaldeen's master-piece, and it is exquisitely rendered here. There are also a good many wood- cuts, not so satisfactorily executed, however.
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