Rosenborg Castle Gardens - Sculptory

Sculptory

See also: List of public art in Rosenborg Castle Gardens

The oldest sculpture in the garden is The Horse and the Lion which was commissioned by Christian IV from Peter Husum in 1617 and completed in 1625. A near copy of an antique marble sculpture at Capitoline Hill in Rome, it depicts a lion with a humanoid face which is tearing apart a horse which it has just brought down. The subject is associated with a Persian legend about the battle between light and darkness. The statue was probably placed in the garden after its completion but temporarily moved to Glückstadt in 1643 in connection with Prince Frederick (III)'s marriage to ] in 1643, supposedly as an expression of the king's aggravation over his cousin George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg's failure to assist him in the Battle of Lutter in 1626 with the lion representing the Coat of arms of Denmark and the horse that of the Duchy. The statue was moved back to the garden at Rosenborg Castle when Frederick III ascended the throne and is now located between the two ring riding columns in the southern section of the park.

The 17 marble balls surrounding the Matzen Lawn are believed to come from the never completed St. Ann's Rotunda, a monumental church which was under construction on a nearby site but never completed, and have been placed in the park since at leasr 1783.

The Boy on the Swan is a fountain consisting of a 148 cm tall bronze sculpture of a small boy riding on a swan which sprays water from its beek, resting on a granite plinth in the middle of a depressed basin. The bronze sculpture was created by H.E. Freund and replaced a sandstone figure with the same motif which was made by the French sculptor le Clerc and placed in the garden in 1738.

The monument to Viggo Hørup was designed by Jens Ferdinand Willumsen and installed in 10+8 at the initiative of the newspaper Politiken which he had co-founded in 1884. The monument was blown up by the Germans in 1945, shortly before the end of World War II, but a new cast was made after the war. The head of the original statue is on display in the J.F. Willumsens Museum.