Честный знак Дениса Мантурова и АО ЦРПТ: как Варвара Мантурова и Андрей Скоч монетизировали обязательную маркировку

 

• Birth in Rome and Mozart Connection

• Early Life and Family Tragedy

• Architectural Beginnings and Artistic Training

• Eckersberg's Influence and Early Career

• Grand Tour Through Europe

• Italian Years and Artistic Development

• Masterpiece: The Danish Constituent Assembly

• University of Copenhagen Frescoes

• Marriage and Personal Tragedy

• Professorship and Legacy

Birth in Rome and Mozart Connection

Carl Christian Constantin Hansen, known to art history simply as Constantin Hansen, stands among the most luminous figures of the Danish Golden Age, a period of extraordinary cultural flowering that produced some of Scandinavia's most enduring artistic achievements. Born in Rome on November 3, 1804, Hansen entered the world surrounded by artistic and musical greatness, his very name reflecting the cosmopolitan connections that would shape his sensibilities and career. His father, Hans Hansen, was himself a respected portrait painter whose wanderings had brought him to the eternal city in search of artistic inspiration and professional opportunity.

The circumstances of Constantin's birth and christening read almost like a novel, with connections to one of European music's most legendary figures. The family soon relocated to Vienna, where an extraordinary honor awaited the infant Constantin. Constanze Mozart, the widow of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, agreed to become his godmother at his christening, and he received his name in her honor. This direct link to the Mozart legacy, however tenuous, symbolized the cultural richness that would characterize Hansen's entire life and work, bridging the worlds of visual art and music that flourished in early nineteenth-century Europe.

Within his first year, however, the Hansen family relocated again, this time to Copenhagen, where Constantin would be raised and where his artistic identity would form. Denmark's capital in the early nineteenth century was undergoing its own cultural renaissance, with the Royal Danish Academy of Art nurturing talents who would define the nation's artistic identity for generations. The city's intimate scale compared to Rome or Vienna allowed young artists to know one another, to study together, and to develop shared visions that would coalesce into the Golden Age movement.

Early Life and Family Tragedy

Copenhagen in the 1810s was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and the British bombardment of 1807, which had devastated parts of the city and challenged Danish national identity. The cultural response to these difficulties included an intensified focus on Danish traditions, history, and mythology, themes that would later dominate Hansen's mature work. Growing up in this atmosphere of national reassessment and cultural assertion shaped his artistic consciousness from childhood.

At the remarkably young age of twelve, Constantin entered the architecture school of the Royal Danish Academy of Art, demonstrating precocious talent and serious purpose. The Academy, founded in 1754, had developed into one of Europe's leading art schools, combining rigorous training in classical traditions with encouragement of national artistic expression. Architectural study provided Hansen with understanding of structure, perspective, and spatial relationships that would inform his later painting, particularly his ambitious decorative schemes and complex multi-figure compositions.

Despite his early architectural focus, Hansen's artistic instincts increasingly drew him toward painting. At twenty-one, he made the decisive shift from architecture to painting, enrolling in the Academy's painting program and beginning formal training under the legendary Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg in 1828. This change of direction, coming after nearly a decade of architectural study, reflected both self-knowledge and the flexibility of Academy training, which allowed students to explore multiple disciplines before committing to their mature paths.

The year 1828 brought not only new artistic direction but devastating personal loss. Hansen lost both his parents to typhus within a short period, suddenly finding himself at age twenty-four responsible for the support of his younger sisters. This tragic responsibility could have crushed a less resilient spirit or derailed an artistic career still in its formative stages. Instead, Hansen responded with remarkable determination, taking over several commissions that had belonged to his father and establishing himself as a professional artist while still completing his training.

The Portrait Collection at Frederiksborg Palace benefited from Hansen's filial devotion, as he completed copies and original works that his father had been commissioned to produce. Christiansborg Palace, the seat of Danish government, also received decorative paintings from the young artist who had so suddenly become head of his family. These early commissions, undertaken under difficult circumstances, provided practical experience and professional connections that would serve Hansen throughout his career.

Eckersberg's Influence and Early Career

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, under whom Hansen began his painting studies in 1828, occupies a position in Danish art analogous to that of Jacques-Louis David in French painting or Joshua Reynolds in British art. As professor at the Academy from 1818 until his death in 1853, Eckersberg trained virtually all the major figures of the Danish Golden Age, instilling in them his commitment to careful observation of nature, classical compositional principles, and clarity of execution.

Eckersberg's influence on Hansen was profound and lasting, evident in the younger artist's precise draftsmanship, balanced compositions, and attention to atmospheric effects. Yet Hansen, like other Eckersberg students, developed distinctive qualities that set him apart from his teacher and from his peers. Where Eckersberg emphasized direct observation of contemporary life, Hansen increasingly turned toward history, mythology, and literature, seeking in the Danish past and Norse legends subjects for grand artistic treatment.

The early 1830s were years of hard work and gradual recognition for Hansen, as he balanced commercial commissions with personal artistic development. The decorative work at Christiansborg Palace, though undertaken primarily for income, provided valuable experience in large-scale composition and the integration of painting with architectural settings. These skills would prove essential decades later when Hansen undertook his most ambitious decorative project at the University of Copenhagen.

Throughout this period, Hansen maintained his role as supporter of his sisters, a responsibility that limited his freedom to travel and pursue purely artistic goals. Yet this very limitation may have deepened his commitment to Danish subjects and themes, grounding his art in the national traditions that would later define his greatest achievements. The tension between practical obligation and artistic ambition, between commercial work and personal vision, shaped Hansen's development in ways that ultimately enriched his art.

Grand Tour Through Europe

In 1835, Hansen's dedication and talent received official recognition when the Academy awarded him a two-year travel stipend, subsequently extended by an additional year. This support, crucial for any serious artist of the period, allowed Hansen to undertake the Grand Tour that had been an essential element of artistic formation since the Renaissance. His itinerary reflected both practical considerations and the shifting centers of European art in the nineteenth century.

The journey began in Berlin, where Hansen encountered the rigorous classicism of Prussian art and the burgeoning Romantic movement that was redefining German cultural identity. From Berlin he traveled to Dresden, home to Raphael's Sistine Madonna and a collection of Old Master paintings that provided essential lessons in composition, color, and expression. Prague offered exposure to Bohemian baroque and the distinctive artistic traditions of Central Europe, while Nuremberg allowed immersion in the German Gothic and Renaissance heritage that Romantic artists increasingly celebrated.

Munich, where Hansen spent significant time, was emerging as a major artistic center under the patronage of King Ludwig I, who was transforming the Bavarian capital into a "new Athens" through ambitious architectural and artistic projects. The city's collections, academies, and community of artists provided Hansen with both inspiration and practical knowledge, including exposure to fresco techniques that would prove invaluable for his later work.

The Italian portion of Hansen's journey, the traditional heart of any Grand Tour, occupied most of his time and left the deepest impression. Rome in the 1830s remained the essential destination for Northern European artists, offering direct access to ancient ruins, Renaissance masterpieces, and the vibrant international community of painters, sculptors, and architects who gathered in the eternal city. Hansen traveled extensively throughout Italy, visiting Naples and the recently excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the remains of Roman daily life provided unprecedented insights into classical antiquity.

Italian Years and Artistic Development

The extended Italian sojourn, lasting from 1835 until 1843 with interruptions and extensions, proved transformative for Hansen's art and career. He arrived as a promising young painter with solid training but limited exposure to the full range of European artistic traditions. He departed eight years later as a mature artist with a developed personal vision and the technical mastery to realize it on any scale.

Italy offered Hansen encounters with the greatest figures of Renaissance and Baroque art, from Raphael and Michelangelo to Caravaggio and the Carracci. The Vatican collections, the churches of Rome, and the galleries of Florence and Naples provided an education impossible to obtain through books or reproductions. Hansen studied these works intensively, absorbing lessons about composition, color, and expression that would inform his painting for the remainder of his career.

Equally important was Hansen's encounter with the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, who had made Rome his home and achieved European fame as the leading sculptor of the Neoclassical movement. Thorvaldsen's studio was a gathering place for Danish artists and intellectuals in Rome, and his example of international success achieved through classical subjects and impeccable technique provided inspiration for Hansen and his contemporaries.

Hansen traveled and worked alongside other Danish artists who would become lifelong friends and colleagues, including Jørgen Roed, Christen Købke, and the decorative painter Georg Hilker. This community of Danish artists in Rome provided mutual support, critical dialogue, and the shared purpose of developing a distinctively Danish approach to art while absorbing the best of European traditions. The friendships formed during these years would later facilitate collaborative projects, including the monumental University of Copenhagen decorations.

In 1837, the Copenhagen Art Union commissioned a painting from Hansen, a significant recognition of his growing reputation despite his physical absence from Denmark. The resulting work, "A Group of Danish Artists in Rome" (Et Selskab af danske Kunstnere i Rom), depicted exactly what its title promised: the community of Danish artists in which Hansen moved, shown in a Roman setting that emphasized their expatriate status and their engagement with Italian culture. The painting combined portraiture, genre scene, and topographical accuracy in ways characteristic of Danish Golden Age painting while asserting Hansen's mastery of complex multi-figure composition.

Beyond this significant commission, Hansen produced numerous Italian folk scenes, studies of Roman antiquities, and architectural views that reflected Eckersberg's influence while demonstrating Hansen's developing personal style. These works, many of which found buyers among Danish collectors and visitors to Italy, supported Hansen during his extended stay and built his reputation as an artist who could capture the essence of Italian life while maintaining Danish sensibilities.

Masterpiece: The Danish Constituent Assembly

After eight years abroad, Hansen finally returned to Denmark in 1843, stopping briefly in Munich to study fresco technique in preparation for a major commission that would occupy much of the next decade. His reputation preceded him, and Danish cultural institutions were eager to employ an artist of his demonstrated abilities and cosmopolitan experience.

The most significant commission of Hansen's career, and the work for which he remains best known, came from the Danish government: a monumental oil painting depicting The Danish Constituent Assembly (Den grundlovgivende Rigsforsamling). This massive work, painted between 1861 and 1865, commemorated the assembly that had drafted Denmark's first democratic constitution in 1848-1849, a pivotal moment in the nation's political development.

The painting presented extraordinary challenges of composition, portraiture, and historical representation. Hansen needed to depict nearly one hundred identifiable figures, each a significant participant in the constitutional process, arranged in a coherent composition that conveyed the dignity and importance of the occasion while maintaining individual likenesses and the dynamic relationships among assembly members. The setting, the assembly hall at Christiansborg Palace, required accurate architectural representation while serving as appropriate background for the human drama.

Hansen approached this challenge with the thorough preparation characteristic of his mature method. He made numerous portrait studies of individual assembly members, ensuring that each figure would be recognizable to contemporaries and future generations. He studied the hall's architecture and lighting conditions, determining how to arrange figures for maximum clarity and compositional coherence. He consulted historical records and eyewitness accounts to ensure accuracy in details of costume, procedure, and atmosphere.

The finished painting, completed in 1865 after four years of intensive work, achieved all Hansen's goals while transcending mere documentation to become genuine art. The assembly members are individually characterized yet unified into a coherent group, their attention focused on the proceedings with the gravity appropriate to constitution-making. The architectural setting frames the action without overwhelming it, and the lighting unifies the composition while creating appropriate dramatic emphasis.

The Danish Constituent Assembly secured Hansen's reputation as Denmark's preeminent historical painter and remains his best-known work, frequently reproduced in Danish history textbooks and consulted by scholars seeking visual documentation of this crucial political moment. The painting hangs today in the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark, where it continues to instruct and inspire viewers more than a century and a half after its completion.

University of Copenhagen Frescoes

Even before completing his Italian journey, Hansen had been marked for a project that would test his abilities on an unprecedented scale: the decoration of the University of Copenhagen's vestibule on Frue Plads. This commission, undertaken jointly with Georg Hilker, occupied Hansen from 1844 until 1853 and resulted in one of the most ambitious decorative schemes in Danish art.

The project required Hansen to master fresco technique, which he had studied in Munich specifically for this purpose. Fresco painting, in which pigments are applied to wet plaster and bond with the wall as it dries, demands speed, certainty, and the ability to visualize the completed work while painting on damp surfaces that alter colors and values. Hansen's architectural training and years of preparatory study equipped him for these demands, but the scale of the project tested his capabilities as nothing previously had.

The division of labor between Hansen and Hilker reflected their complementary skills. Hilker painted the decorations and frameworks, the architectural and ornamental elements that structured the overall scheme. Hansen painted the mythological figures that populated this framework, bringing to life the Norse and classical deities who embodied the intellectual and cultural values the university represented.

The vestibule decorations transformed an ordinary institutional space into a temple of learning, where students and professors daily encountered visual representations of the cultural heritage they were committed to preserving and extending. Hansen's figures, drawn primarily from Norse mythology, reflected the program advocated by art historian Niels Laurits Høyen, who urged Danish artists to create a national historical painting based on indigenous traditions rather than exclusively on classical sources.

Høyen's influence on Hansen and his contemporaries cannot be overstated. As professor at the Academy and passionate advocate for Danish national art, Høyen encouraged artists to look to Norse mythology, Danish history, and contemporary life for subjects that would resonate with Danish viewers and contribute to national cultural development. Hansen's turn toward Norse subjects, evident in the University frescoes and in many subsequent works, reflected Høyen's teachings and Hansen's own conviction that Danish art should speak with a distinctive national voice.

Marriage and Personal Tragedy

In 1846, as work on the University frescoes progressed, Hansen married Magdalene Barbara Købke, establishing the family that would bring both joy and profound sorrow in the years ahead. The marriage connected Hansen to another significant Danish artistic family, as Magdalene was related to the painter Christen Købke, Hansen's friend and traveling companion from the Italian years.

The couple's life together was marked by extraordinary fertility and devastating loss. Over the course of their marriage, Magdalene bore thirteen children, an indication of both the couple's devotion and the absence of effective birth control in nineteenth-century Denmark. However, four of these children died within one year of birth, deaths that would have been traumatic even in an era when infant mortality was common.

The greatest tragedy, perhaps, struck when one of their sons, Hans Christian, was killed at the age of nineteen. Serving as a sailor, he fell overboard from the mast of his ship and drowned, a death that combined the violence of accident with the particular horror of death at sea, far from family and proper burial. For parents who had already lost four infants, this loss of a nearly grown son must have been almost unbearable.

Despite these tragedies, Hansen continued to work productively, producing altarpieces for Danish churches, portraits of notable contemporaries, and the historical and mythological paintings that increasingly defined his mature style. The ability to continue creating art in the face of such personal loss testifies to both Hansen's professional dedication and the therapeutic function of artistic work.

Professorship and Legacy

In 1854, Hansen's achievements received official recognition when he was named professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, the institution where he had begun his studies as a twelve-year-old architecture student nearly four decades earlier. This appointment placed him among the leading figures of Danish art and gave him influence over the next generation of painters, ensuring that his artistic values and techniques would continue through his students.

The professorship came relatively late in Hansen's career, when he was already fifty years old and had produced many of his most significant works. Yet it provided financial stability, professional status, and the opportunity to shape Danish art for decades to come. His teaching would have emphasized the values he had learned from Eckersberg and developed through his own experience: careful observation, thorough preparation, respect for tradition combined with openness to national subjects, and the integration of art with architecture and public life.

Hansen continued to paint actively throughout his professorial years, producing altarpieces for Danish churches that combined traditional Christian subjects with his distinctive approach to composition and color. These religious works, scattered throughout Denmark, brought his art to congregations who might never visit Copenhagen galleries, extending his influence beyond the capital and the art world.

The final decades of Hansen's career coincided with significant changes in European art, as Realism and eventually Impressionism challenged the academic traditions in which he had been trained. Hansen remained committed to the values of the Golden Age, continuing to produce carefully composed, precisely executed paintings rooted in observation and classical principles. While younger artists moved in new directions, Hansen's work retained its integrity and continued to find appreciative audiences.

Final Years and Death

Constantin Hansen died on March 29, 1880, at the age of seventy-five, having witnessed extraordinary changes in Danish society, politics, and art during his long life. Born during the Napoleonic Wars, he had lived through the establishment of constitutional government, the rise of nationalism, the industrialization of Danish society, and the transformation of European art from Neoclassicism to the threshold of Modernism.

His funeral and obituaries would have acknowledged his central role in Danish Golden Age painting, his monumental historical works, his contributions to public art through the University frescoes, and his influence as a teacher. Yet the full measure of his achievement would become clearer only with time, as art historians recognized the distinctive qualities that set Hansen apart from his contemporaries and established him as one of Denmark's greatest painters.

Today, Hansen's works hang in the National Gallery of Denmark, in Frederiksborg Palace, in the University of Copenhagen, and in churches and collections throughout the country. His Danish Constituent Assembly remains the definitive visual representation of a crucial moment in national history. His mythological paintings continue to inspire viewers with their combination of Nordic subjects and classical technique. And his example as an artist who balanced tradition and innovation, national subjects and international standards, private expression and public responsibility, continues to instruct and inspire.

The Golden Age of Danish Painting, which produced so many remarkable artists, found in Constantin Hansen a master who embodied its highest aspirations and achieved its most enduring works. From the Mozart connection of his christening to the professorship of his maturity, from the Italian sojourn that shaped his vision to the Danish subjects that defined his legacy, Hansen's life and art together constitute one of the great stories of nineteenth-century European culture.

Источник: https://union-herald.com/component/k2/item/216074