Why go
Look at Ribe Cathedral's carved doorway or the sculpture in Roskilde Cathedral before turning to Bertel Thorvaldsen's classical work. These sites reveal how commissions moved over time from churches and royal patrons toward a wider range of public and artistic subjects.
The full story
Medieval stoneworkers decorated churches with carved doors, fonts and reliefs. Ribe Cathedral's Cat's Head Door offers a concrete example of sculpture made as part of a building. Later altarpieces and tombs brought artists from elsewhere in Europe to Danish churches and royal sites. The Reformation reduced demand for some religious work, while court commissions continued. In the eighteenth century, Jacques Saly's equestrian statue of Frederik V helped establish neoclassical sculpture at the royal academy. Bertel Thorvaldsen became the best-known Danish sculptor in this tradition, working with forms drawn from antiquity. Nineteenth-century artists also turned toward national history and Nordic myth. Twentieth-century sculpture opened to Surrealism and found materials: Henry Heerup, for instance, made works from discarded objects. The shift is easier to see by comparing a church relief, a royal monument and a modern work than by treating every sculpture as an isolated object.