Two Not-So-Boring Museums

We saved two museums until the end of our trip, mostly because I was a little worried that they'd be boring.  But we actually discovered something unexpected in each place!  Yesterday happened to be a free Wednesday at the Thorvaldsen sculpture museum, so we walked over there to check it out.  Bertel Thorvaldsen became famous as a sculptor in the early 1800's and spent most of his life in Italy perfecting his classical style.  He came home to Denmark at the end of his life and donated all of his casts to a museum named in his honor.

Thorvaldsen designed many famous monuments throughout Europe.  I had not realized that he designed the Löwendenkmal, or Lion of Lucerne, which commemorates the bravery of the Swiss guards who died trying to protect Louis XVI during the French Revolution.  It's an enormous monument cut into the sheer side of a cliff face.  I saw it in Lucerne during my first backpacking trip through Europe and the memory of the noble dying lion has stuck with me all these years.  The image below is just a small cast from Thorvaldsen's studio.  If you've never seen the monument itself, the wikipedia page has a photo but it's difficult to get a sense of scale -- it's actually 18 feet tall and 30 feet long.

Today we headed over to the National Museum to learn a little more about the history of Denmark.  They had some great Bronze age and Viking age stuff:

Ceremonial Horned Helmets

Stick drawing of a Viking Longship

But the really interesting find for Kevin was in a section on daily life in Denmark throughout history.  An entire apartment had been relocated to show where the poorer working classes would have lived in 1800 in Copenhagen.  We were very surprised to see the address the apartment had been taken from: Adelgade 91 -- the very same apartment building where Kevin's great-great-grandfather Carl lived with his family ninety years later!  So even though the building has since been torn down, it was cool to see that a tiny bit of it has been preserved for posterity in Denmark's National Museum.