Comment on March 1827
[Author’s note in the text:]
There is a false metaphor in the conception. The Swiss guard may have resembled a lion, but a lion will scarcely interest himself about the preservation of any flag, either white or red. The expression of pain and death is perhaps as true as it is strong, but there is a great deal of guess-work throughout. Thorwaltzen smiled and shook his head as he passed it, and pointed with a natural pride to a model of the same animal which he had just terminated from nature. An extensive menagerie had arrived at Rome, and he had profited by the occasion. There is, no doubt, much difference between “the word on the spot,” and “the cart-load of reflections afterwards,” and every young artist would do well who thinks otherwise, to compare the two works immediately before us. Thorwaltzen in this instance is the best commentator on himself. But the precision of the French school, and their good faith in details, is every day gaining ground. Canova executed his Minotaur from some of the finest living, or as some say dying horses, he could find at Rome. His lions, if not altogether from Nature, are glorious approaches, and sometimes, as in that which is sleeping, perhaps beyond. The female charms of Italy were at his disposal, and for once he almost realized the stories of ancient art. Thorwaltzen himself never executes a statue without the deepest and most extensive research. His Venus cost him thirty models, Bartolini’s Baccante still more. I heard them regret, instating these particulars, the necessity and expense of these studies. Early marriages, and earlier dissipation, had thinned the capitals of a great portion of their ancient beauty.
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