Classical archaeology has a long and strong pedigree in Denmark, even though classical culture, in terms of its materiality, only reached the geographically defined areas of modern Denmark through exchanges and gifts passed between the Romano-Germanic cultures and Danish chieftains during what is termed the Roman Iron Age, from 200 BC to AD 200. In Denmark, classical archaeology became a key part of how Greek and Roman cultures were studied, following growing interest in their material remains from the late 18th and early 19th centuries onward.
The first Danish scholar to pursue this path was Peter Oluf Brøndsted, who in 1813 became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Copenhagen: then the only university in the country. Following his extensive travels in Greece and engagement with classical Greek art and architecture in the early decades of the 19th century, he was appointed Professor of Classical Archaeology in 1832. Collections of Greek and Roman art had already been amassed by Danish kings, thereby connecting the Danish royal house with European ideas of a shared culture rooted in ancient Greece. The earliest objects in these collections arrived in the 17th century. Among them were two fragmented heads from one of the metopes of the Parthenon temple in Athens. These were purchased in 1688, and at that time labelled as two heads from the Temple of Artemis in Ephesos. Back then, this monument was considered more significant than the Parthenon, because it featured in the canon of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
In the late 19th century, the landscape of classical antiquities collections in Copenhagen changed dramatically, due to the activities of the brewer Carl Jacobsen. His first ancient acquisition was the head of an archaic Greek sculpture. It was, though, the contemporary availability of Roman-period sculptures on the art market across the Mediterranean – with an increasing focus on Rome itself as the market grew there – that came to define his collections. Today, displayed at a world-famous museum – the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which Jacobsen gifted to the Danish state – the objects he amassed are regarded as one of the most outstanding collections of classical sculpture outside Greece and Italy.
