Ymer dier koen Ødhumbla

The museum keeps only the Danish title — Ymer dier koen Ødhumbla, “Ymir suckles the cow Auðumbla”, the primeval giant and the cow of Norse cosmogony — and dates the small canvas 1775–1778. It is painted in oil on canvas and measures 37 × 45.5 cm; the museum holds it in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture. Those are Abildgaard’s years in Rome, and the gallery’s own account of him names precisely this line of work — the Old Norse subjects drawn from the Edda and Saxo — as what anticipated the tasks that awaited him on his return to Denmark.

Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809) heard the patriarchs of neoclassicism — the Comte de Caylus, Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann — from his Academy teachers Edvard Mandelberg and Johannes Wiedewelt, won the Academy’s travelling stipend in 1771, and settled in Rome on history painting in the grand style. In the circle around the sculptor Tobias Sergel and the painter Johann Heinrich Füssli he developed his sense for the sublime in Shakespeare, Homer and Ossian, and with Den sårede Filoktet he placed himself in the pre-Romantics’ avant-garde. For him allegory and history painting were art’s highest forms, and the museum notes that he, like Füssli and William Blake, consistently turned his back on the imitation of reality. In 1778 he was commissioned to paint ten pictures of the Oldenburg kings for the knights’ hall at Christiansborg, a project finished in 1791 and almost entirely destroyed in the palace fire of 1794. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).