'In the midst of a magic world,' he said, T know of no more beautiful place on earth.' And while Mark Twain was happy to satirise the 19th-century fad for climbing mountains he adopted a more serious manner when he saw the Lion Monument, designed by the Danish sculptor
Bertel Thorvaldsen and carved into a rock in Lucerne to commemorate the Swiss Guards who died in 1792 while protecting the Tuileries from the Parisian mob.
We leave the bus for a short walk to visit the "Lion Monument" a carving in sandstone of a grieving lion leaning on a shield with a Swiss flag Mark Twain once remarked as a tourist himself looking at the monument that it was: "the saddest statute he had ever seen" Danish sculptor
Bertel Thorvaldsen designed it in memory of Swiss guards who died defending Louis VXI and Marie Antoinette in 1812.
Bertel Thorvaldsen; a daguerreotype portrait from 1840.
Andersen's next feverish passion was for a 22-year-old law student named Henrik Stampe, who often posed for neoclassical artist
Bertel Thorvaldsen's sculptures of naked youths on horseback.
In 1833-4 he travelled extensively through Germany and France to Rome, where he befriended the sculptor
Bertel Thorvaldsen, but a few years later he was attacked by another famous Danish contemporary, the philosopher SAren Kierkegaard, over his novel Kun en Spillemand (Only a Fiddler).
When heroic sculptor
Bertel Thorvaldsen returned to Denmark after a life largely spent in Rome, C.
Gade and figures such as
Bertel Thorvaldsen and Hans Christian Andersen became national heroes, and their works came to serve as symbols of the Danish state.
Most of his life was spent in Rome where he had gone to study with Albert
Bertel Thorvaldsen. Among his noteworthy works were the bronze doors of the Senate portico, sculptural studies of James Otis and Beethoven, the Washington Monument in Richmond, Va., and the Armed Liberty, crowning the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C.
A design by
Bertel Thorvaldsen came to light only recently.