Nicolai Abildgaard, 1775 - The Wounded Philoctetes - fine art print

About this more than 240 year-old painting

The over 240 year old artwork was created by the Danish painter Nicolai Abildgaard in 1775. The piece of art belongs to the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark)'s art collection, which is the largest museum of fine arts in Denmark and is attached to the Danish Ministry of Culture.. With courtesy of National Gallery of Denmark (public domain).: . What is more, the alignment is landscape and has a ratio of 1.4 : 1, which implies that the length is 40% longer than the width. Nicolai Abildgaard was a painter from Denmark, whose style can mainly be assigned to Romanticism. The Romanticist painter lived for a total of 66 years, born in 1743 in Copenhagen and died in the year 1809 in Copenhagen.

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• Acrylic glass print (with real glass coating): The print on acrylic glass, which is sometimes described as a UV print on plexiglass, makes the original work of art into wonderful wall décor and offers a distinct alternative to dibond and canvas prints. Your favorite artwork is manufactured with modern UV direct printing machines. The special effect of this are sharp and rich colors.
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The product

Work of art information

Short overview of the artist

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General information from Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) (© Copyright - Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) - Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark))

From 1772 Abildgaard spent five years in Rome thanks to a scholarship granted by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. It was while in Rome that he created this depiction of the legendary hero Philoctetes, whose screams of pain caused by a festering snakebite made his comrades-in-arms abandon him on a Greek island during the Trojan war.

Challenging neoclassicism The dominant and deeply rooted movement within figure painting at this time was neoclassicism with its emphasis on self-command and calm. Abildgaard challenges this pattern with his depiction of a body convulsively curved around an axis of pain; a body that feels like it is forcefully restrained within the picture field with its tense musculature and twisted limbs.

Avantgarde, pathos and Weltschmerz The 1770s brought with them an increased emphasis on grand passions among the Northern European ”avant-garde”, and this new outlook also left its mark on Abildgaard’s circles in Rome. The interest in pathos and Weltschmerz is clearly evident in his works from this era.

In this case he used a principal work of classical sculpture as the basis for his rendition of Philoctetes’ tormented state: The Torso Belvedere in the Vatican museum served as the model for the plastic and mannered rendition of the hero’s upper body. With this move, Abildgaard’s stylistic innovation was imbued with features of a work canonised by neoclassicism – without, however, reducing the tensions in the painting.