Thorvaldsens Museum

I'D HAD no more than a quarter of an hour there, five years before, but it had left me with strong and peculiar memories. The works themselves, the hundreds of sculptures in plaster and marble, had been impressive, but the building that housed them was what stayed in my mind. I’d seen nothing else like it: a massive free-standing Egyptian temple, painted a bright ochre; figures moving in frescoed procession around its outer walls, cream and ochre and plum against black backgrounds; a glazed inner cloister, in which statuary gleamed or hid in stripes of sunlight and shadow; and running round it, red, green or purple rooms in enfilade, like cells or stalls, each holding a white marble hero or goddess. The inspired colour scheme of these rooms, faded and subtilised by time, was unusually striking. It continued in the long central courtyard, frescoed with soaring palm trees, where the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen himself was buried, as if in a northern dream of the south.

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