Langvæg med en dør. Dekoration af et værelse med tøndehvælving 1790s

Editor: So, this is "Langv\u00e6g med en d\u00f8r. Dekoration af et v\u00e6relse med t\u00f8ndehv\u00e6lving", or "Long Wall with a Door. Decoration of a Room with Barrel Vaulting", a pencil drawing from the 1790s by Nicolai Abildgaard. It’s held at the SMK in Copenhagen. It feels like looking into an unrealized dream, or the bare bones of a grand idea. What's your take? Curator: It’s like peering into the mind of a neoclassical architect. I love the way Abildgaard teases us with just enough detail – the faint outlines of paneling, the delicate frieze along the ceiling. The sparseness almost feels radical, doesn’t it? Editor: Radical for the 1790s, perhaps? What’s catching my eye are those framed empty rectangles, as if they should hold portraits or landscapes. Curator: Exactly! Or perhaps mirrors, reflecting the room back on itself, endlessly multiplying the neoclassical order. But tell me, what feeling does the overall symmetry evoke for you? Does it seem cold or balanced? Editor: Hmm, that’s a tough one. Both, maybe? There’s something calming about the balance, but also a certain austerity. It feels precise, controlled, like an exercise in pure form. Curator: Precisely! Abildgaard’s pencil here becomes a scalpel, dissecting space and light, and reforming it according to reason and ideal proportion. One almost feels invited to mentally ‘inhabit’ this austere design and fill it up by creating some fictional scenes happening in this space. Editor: It really brings that time period to life. I hadn’t thought about the human element. Curator: It is always interesting how what appears initially bare and geometric, turns out to invite interaction with the piece.