This volume is dedicated to Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770- 1844), a Danish sculptor of international fame during the XIX century. Born in Copenhagen in 1770, he spent more than forty years in Italy, maintaining a large workshop in Rome. When he eventually returned to his native land in 1838 he was more known in Europe than in Denmark. But in the following years it became rather vice versa. Obviously this is connected with the fact that in Copenhagen he could not keep the close contact he had in Rome with the international art community and art market in the cultural capital of Europe. As a matter of fact only within the last 30 years has Thorvaldsen regained his rightful place in the European art historical context and he is considered as an outstanding representative of the Neoclassical period in sculpture. In fact, his work has often been compared to that of Antonio Canova and he became the foremost artist in the field after Canova's death in 1822. The really strong point of this book is that it precisely links together Thorvaldsen's art with a broad international, artistic context and thus contributes to a more faceted understanding of his work.

Stop, look, and discover—the streets and parks of Manhattan are filled with beautiful historic monuments that will entertain, stimulate, and inspire you. Among the 54 monuments in this volume are major figures in American history: Washington, Lincoln, Lafayette, Horace Greeley, and Gertrude Stein; more obscure figures: Daniel Butterfield, J. Marion Sims, and King Jagiello; as well as the icons of New York: Atlas, Prometheus, and the Firemen's Memorial. The monuments represent the work of some of America's best sculptors: Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Farragut and Sherman, Daniel Chester French’s Four Continents, and Anna Hyatt Huntington’s José Martí and Joan of Arc. Each monument, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, is located on a map of Manhattan and includes easy-to-follow directions. All the sculptures are considered both as historical mementos and as art. We learn of furious General Sherman court-martialing a civilian journalist, and also of exasperated Saint Gaudens’ proposing a hook-and-spring device for improving his assistants' artistic acuity as they help model Sherman. We discover how Lincoln dealt with a vociferous Confederate politician from Ohio, and why the Lincoln in Union Square doesn't rank as a top-notch Lincoln portrait. Sidebars reveal other aspects of the figure or event commemorated, using personal quotes, poems, excerpts from nineteenth-century periodicals (New York Times, Harper's Weekly), and writers ranging from Aeschylus, Washington Irving, and Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to Mark Twain and Henryk Sienkiewicz. As a historical account, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide is a fascinating look at figures and events that changed New York, the United States and the world. As an aesthetic handbook it provides a compact method for studying sculpture, inspired by Ayn Rand’s writings on art. For residents and tourists, and historians and students, who want to spend more time viewing and appreciating sculpture and New York history, this is the start of a unique voyage of discovery.

This brilliant book focuses on the aesthetic concerns of the two most important sculptors of the early 19th century, the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) and his illustrious Danish rival Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Rather than comparing their artistic output, the distinguished art historian David Bindman addresses the possible impact of Kantian aesthetics on their work. Both artists had elevated reputations, and their sculptures attracted interest from philosophically minded critics. Despite the sculptors' own apparent disdain for theory, Bindman argues that they were in dialogue with and greatly influenced by philosophical and critical debates, and made many decisions in creating their sculptures specifically in response to those debates. Warm Flesh, Cold Marble considers such intriguing topics as the aesthetic autonomy of works of art, the gender of the subject, the efficacy of marble as an imitative medium, the question of color and texture in relation to ideas and practices of antiquity, and the relationship between the whiteness of marble and ideas of race.

This beautiful book features masterpieces of sculpture in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum dating from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Celebrated works by the great European sculptors - including Luca and Andrea della Robbia, Juan Mart©Ưnez Monta©ł©♭s, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin- are joined by striking new additions to the collection, notably Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's remarkable bust of a troubled and introspective man. The ninety-two selected examples are diverse in media (marble, bronze, wood, terracotta, and ivory) and size - ranging from a tiny oil lamp fantastically conceived and decorated by the Renaissance bronze sculptor Riccio to Antonio Canova's eight-foot-high Perseus with the Head of Medusa, executed in the heroic Neoclassical style. Incorporating information from the latest scholarly research and recent conservation studies, sculpture specialist Ian Wardropper discusses the history and significance of the highlighted works, each of which is reproduced with glorious new photography.

Although we are now, more than ever before, bombarded with portraits in both social and traditional media, interest in the three-dimensional sculptural portrait has declined dramatically. What accounts for this trend, and what does it mean for our understanding of the portrait as a medium? Portraits have a visceral power of attraction. They arouse our curiosity, prompting us to wonder who the person is behind the face - and, by extension, to reflect on our own identity. But whereas portrait paintings and photographs are immediately arresting, and fascinating, sculptural portraits can seem harder to approach there is no background and few details to help orient the beholder. As a result, sculpted portraits may seem like a sea of unknown faces that one only takes fleeting note of in passing; irrelevant, immaterial, perhaps even boring. But that is not how it used to be. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was one of Europe's most popular portrait artists. Over the course of his lifetime, he created approximately 160 portraits, ranging from members of Europe's royal houses to leading cultural figures to ordinary Danes. Thorvaldsen's portraits thus make up the biggest single category of artworks in his oeuvre. In former times, such sculptural portraits were a common phenomenon. So what happened? Why did they go out of fashion? These are some of the questions that this book seeks to illuminate. The book contains essays and articles by 42 authors, amongst them Whitney Davis, Malcolm Baker, Grant Parker, Ulrich Pfisterer, Rolf Schneider, Peter Fibiger Bang, Tim Flohr Sørensen, and Jane Fejfer.