The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, December 1883Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
History
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, December 1883
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
The Danish artist, Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770-1844), penetrated farther
than all these masters into the spirit and the beauty of classical art;
and created, with inexhaustible fertility of imagination, and with the
noblest feeling for form, an array of works which are conceived with
a pure, chaste, and noble appreciation of the Greek spirit. In his
celebrated frieze of the triumph of Alexander in the Villa Carlotta, on
the lake of Como, the genuine Grecian relief style is revived in all
its perfect purity and severity. He also treats with the versatility of
genius and with charming simplicity the subjects of ancient mythology, in
numerous statues, groups, and smaller reliefs; and even introduces into
the domain of Christian representation a novel, beautiful, and dignified
treatment, in the sculptures executed by him for the Church of Our Lady
in Copenhagen. Among his monumental works we may mention the statues of
Gutenberg at Mayence, and of Schiller at Stuttgart, the Dying Lion at
Lucerne, the equestrian statue of the Elector Maximilian at Munich, and
the tombs of the Duke of Leuchtenberg in St. Michael’s Church at Munich,
and of Pope Pius VII. in St. Peter’s Church at Rome.
While the wide domain of idealistic sculpture was thus again cultivated
with such versatility of inspiration, the Berlin artist, Johann Gottfried
Schadow (1764-1850), adopted a more realistic style, especially directed
toward lifelike composition and distinct characterization of individual
peculiarities. His monument of the Count von der Mark in the Church of
Ste. Dorothy in Berlin, the statue of Frederic the Great at Stettin, and,
in a less degree, the Blücher monument at Rostock, and that of Luther at
Wittenberg, as well as many others, are vigorous protests against the
mannerism of the hitherto prevailing tendency, and re-open to sculpture a
field which had now been almost lost to her for two hundred years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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