Getty Adds a Thorvaldsen Portrait

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Rosa Taddei, 1826. Getty Museum

The Getty Museum has acquired a portrait bust by Danish Neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. A marble likeness of Italian actor and poet Rosa Taddei, it was shown at TEFAF 2020 by Galleria Carlo Virgilio, Rome. Measuring just under 20 in. high, the Getty bust is the only version in stone. A preparatory plaster is in the Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen.

Rosa Taddei (1799–1869) was what we now might call a spoken word artist. She drew audience suggestions out of a hat and improvised original poems on the spot. Taddei and Thorvaldsen knew each other, and it's said that Taddei once embarrassed the sculptor with her fulsome praise during a performance. The icy reserve of Thorvaldsen's portrait belies the subject's reported abilities as a tragic actor.

Thorvaldsen's only rival in early 19th-century Rome was Antonio Canova. They were like Matisse and Picasso, leapfrogging each other's innovations. Yet within a century, both sculptors' work had fallen out of favor. To some Modernist critics, Neoclassicism was just short of kitsch—a sentimental imitation of another age's art. 

That made no difference to William Randolph Hearst, who adored Thorvaldsen when almost no one else did (the 1930s). Hearst bought two statues of Venus, by Thorvaldsen and Canova, and displayed them together in his San Simeon castle. Hearst Castle also has four large mythological reliefs by Thorvaldsen.

Meanwhile Thorvaldsen was gaining a kitsch-adjacent following outside the art world. In 1939 Forest Lawn commissioned an 11-ft-high replica of Thorvaldsen's Christus for its Glendale cemetery. It was installed in 1947 and followed by three more copies for other Forest Lawn sites. In the 1950s, the Mormon Elders determined that Christus was the most beautiful likeness of Jesus. They commissioned a replica for Salt Lake City and then for Mormon temples around the globe, including the one in West Los Angeles. 

It wasn't until the late 20th century that Thorvaldsen's critical reputation began to recover. Art historian Robert Rosenblum argued that Neoclassicism should not be judged by 20th century values. The great Neoclassicists were a crucial foundation of Modern art, not its antithesis. A joint Canova-Thorvaldsen exhibition in Milan (2019) embodied this reassessment.

Like Turner, Thorvaldsen bequeathed most of his art to his home nation. Only a few of Thorvaldsen's original works are in U.S. art museums. There are two portrait busts at the Philadelphia Museum and one at the National Gallery of Art. The Met, Chrysler, and Minneapolis have mythological subjects. 

At the Getty, the portrait joins an international selection of Neoclassical sculpture as well as Danish paintings by Christen Købke and Vilhelm Hammershøi. Rosa Taddei will debut alongside Joshua Reynold's Mai in a special presentation that runs Sep. 15, 2026, to Mar. 14, 2027. That installation will include other painted and sculpted portraits of the period.