Discovering Something Old

Everywhere I traveled I found something unexpected. In Copenhagen it was in the cathedral.

Not the usual Gothic cathedral like the ones I saw in photos and for real in England and France. Instead, on the walking street in Copenhagen, I turned my head to the left and saw a Roman temple.

Churches that looked like Roman temples were common in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Baptists, in their determination not to resemble Catholic churches, built many churches in the “classical” style.

As a child in Fort Worth my family attended one of those. Behind tall fake marble columns was a “sanctuary” with rows of dark wooden benches. The windows were ugliest stained glass windows I ever saw: rectangles of garish colored glass, sickly red, bright orange, and bilious green. Years later in Turkey, I saw mosques with beautiful tile work interiors. But when I visited a poor village, the mosque was a simple, unadorned cube. I saw a definite resemblance between that mosque and the Christian church of my childhood.

In contrast, the interior of Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral had a traditional long nave. Standing in arches in the side aisles were tall marble statues representing the twelve apostles. If you think of Jesus’s apostles as giants among men, go to Copenhagen. Each statue was ten feet tall. Done in the classical tradition, each man was accompanied by his symbol, St. Andrew with his X shaped cross, St. Peter with his keys.

At the end of the center aisle, behind the baptismal font, was a ten-foot statue of Jesus, with his hands outstretched as if to urge people to come forward for his blessing. After so many churches were Jesus hangs on the cross suffering for mankind’s sins, I liked the Danish Christ where Jesus stood tall and erect, extending his hands in a joyous welcome.

The statues were by the Danish sculptor Thorvalsen. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I hadn’t. Google never heard of him either and could not tell me if I spelled his name correctly. He was famous a hundred and fifty years ago.

Inspired by the cathedral, I went to the Thorvalsen Museum, devoted exclusively to his work. A large hall was filled with marble statues, all skillfully executed in the classical style. I bought a poster picturing his coyly posed Venus. She could have been dug up on some Greek isle.

That kind of sculpture is not fashionable in these days when such “moderns” as Rodin, Moore, and Modigliani (another one Google can’t find) have been replaced by the strange shapes sculpted by David Smith, Stella, and others who are paid millions for objects with no recognizable form.

Isn’t it nice of the Danes to remember unfashionable Thorvalsen and keep his work on public display, not only in the cathedral, but also in his own museum?