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Let me take you to a secret place.
Officially this is a museum. The house and studio of a sculptor.
To me, this is a place where movement has been frozen, some sort of Sleeping Beauty castle.
Only populated with wild naked dancers…
Hendrik Christian Andersen was born in Bergen – Norway – in 1872. The family was extremely poor so immigrated to Newport – USA – when he was just a child.
Although they could not afford a Grand Tour, both his and his elder brother’s, Andreas, artistic talents were recognised by the wealthier families of Newport and Boston and they were given grants to study further in Europe, in Paris and Rome.
Hendrik fell in love with Rome and moved there with his mother in 1896. In Paris, Andreas met a young American heiress, Olivia Cushing. They married in Boston in 1902 but he dies of phthisis just one month after the wedding. The lady had been taken with the Andersen family and she then fled her stifling environment to Rome to live with Hendrik and his mother.
Her money allowed Hendrik to design and build this enormous house and studio - which nowadays constitutes the museum - and to dedicate himself to an utopia, the “World Centre of Communication”, a model city built around a long alley of monuments and buildings ending in a sea harbour, which he all designed with the help of French architect and Prix de Rome Ernest Hébrard and for which he produced a vast quantity of drawings and statues in terracotta, stucco, or bronze, which today still populate the studio and gallery on the ground floor of the house.
Popular in the Anglo-American circles which inhabited Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century, friend of Henry James, he however never managed to bring this wild dream of his into fruition, despite some vague promises by Mussolini, to whom the sheer out of scale aspects of the project would have appealed as a work worth of the Roman Empire.
The other major work of art which took a large part of his life is the tribute to his brother Andreas, whose tomb at the non-Catholic graveyard he designed and which he topped up with a magnificent bronze sculpture later moved back inside the studio because of its weight and the risks of it capsizing – the matter of equilibrium of the group had been a vexing problem for the sculptor, problem later solved with the help of scientists
The house and studio were donated to the Italian government upon Hendrik’s death.
This is his revenge: the Italians had not wanted his art when he was alive so he made sure they would get it once he was dead.
The museum is opened to the public since 1999 and is deserted – not a lot of people come to Rome to visit the studio of a forgotten Norwegian utopian – and despite the gentle and enthusiastic presence of the local guides, the whole place gives the idea of a haunted mansion, with dancers frozen in flight, fairies and merfolk awaiting just a touch or a magic word to come to life.
So why don't you try your luck next time you are in Rome?
Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum
Via Stanislao Mancini, 20
Rome
Officially this is a museum. The house and studio of a sculptor.
To me, this is a place where movement has been frozen, some sort of Sleeping Beauty castle.
Only populated with wild naked dancers…
Hendrik Christian Andersen was born in Bergen – Norway – in 1872. The family was extremely poor so immigrated to Newport – USA – when he was just a child.
Although they could not afford a Grand Tour, both his and his elder brother’s, Andreas, artistic talents were recognised by the wealthier families of Newport and Boston and they were given grants to study further in Europe, in Paris and Rome.
Hendrik fell in love with Rome and moved there with his mother in 1896. In Paris, Andreas met a young American heiress, Olivia Cushing. They married in Boston in 1902 but he dies of phthisis just one month after the wedding. The lady had been taken with the Andersen family and she then fled her stifling environment to Rome to live with Hendrik and his mother.
Her money allowed Hendrik to design and build this enormous house and studio - which nowadays constitutes the museum - and to dedicate himself to an utopia, the “World Centre of Communication”, a model city built around a long alley of monuments and buildings ending in a sea harbour, which he all designed with the help of French architect and Prix de Rome Ernest Hébrard and for which he produced a vast quantity of drawings and statues in terracotta, stucco, or bronze, which today still populate the studio and gallery on the ground floor of the house.
Popular in the Anglo-American circles which inhabited Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century, friend of Henry James, he however never managed to bring this wild dream of his into fruition, despite some vague promises by Mussolini, to whom the sheer out of scale aspects of the project would have appealed as a work worth of the Roman Empire.
The other major work of art which took a large part of his life is the tribute to his brother Andreas, whose tomb at the non-Catholic graveyard he designed and which he topped up with a magnificent bronze sculpture later moved back inside the studio because of its weight and the risks of it capsizing – the matter of equilibrium of the group had been a vexing problem for the sculptor, problem later solved with the help of scientists
The house and studio were donated to the Italian government upon Hendrik’s death.
This is his revenge: the Italians had not wanted his art when he was alive so he made sure they would get it once he was dead.
The museum is opened to the public since 1999 and is deserted – not a lot of people come to Rome to visit the studio of a forgotten Norwegian utopian – and despite the gentle and enthusiastic presence of the local guides, the whole place gives the idea of a haunted mansion, with dancers frozen in flight, fairies and merfolk awaiting just a touch or a magic word to come to life.
So why don't you try your luck next time you are in Rome?
Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum
Via Stanislao Mancini, 20
Rome
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