This volume analytically traces the exemplary artistic career of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, one of the major figures in nineteenth-century European art. His vast body of work, from mythological sculpture to great civic monuments to Christian sculpture, is reinterpreted within its original context: the city of Rome, understood as the cosmopolitan laboratory of modern sculpture. The artist worked there between 1797 and 1842, establishing a school of enduring influence. Drawing on the critical debate of the time and the intense engagement with traditional figurative sources and the works of his contemporaries, particularly in dialogue with that other great “modern classic,” Antonio Canova, this monograph suggests new interpretations of Thorvaldsen’s complex poetics and his innovative formal choices. The volume is accompanied by a bibliography and an index.