Godfather could tell stories, cut out pictures and draw 4.

 Canova monument. In the Frari Church in Venice, April 20, 1834. Kilde: Odense Bys Museer

Nature and art.

It is worth noting what Andersen says in The Fairy Tale of My Life of his artistic development during the first long journey to the south in 1833-1834:

‘My dwelling here on the scenery of Italy as I am relating a life history will perhaps be held against me; indeed, it may be feared of many later journeys, with justification, that they may degenerate into description, though in the following period it will be seen that it was the people I came into contact with that made the deepest impression; however, on this, my first visit to Italy , it was solely nature and art that were paramount, the real experience. ..’
As early as in the diary of the journey in the Harz we see how the experience of mountain scenery and the paintings he saw in the Berlin museum gripped him alternately. He notes a number of names of old masters. And in leafing through at Odense the two booklets of drawings he made in the early 1830s to amuse a small boy, Otto Zinck, pencil sketches with fanciful, dreamlike figurative scenes in a casual but often expressive form, one understands why, in his travel diary, he dwells especially on his reaction to the sombre demonic power of Hieronymus Bosch’s Doomsday subject in Berlin. He sketched a few of the bizarre, gnomic figures from there. He was both repelled and attracted.
One of the innumerable testimonies to Andersen’s intense sensibility in the experience of scenic space occurs in the diary under May 28,1831:
‘Through the most romantic valleys, where the nightingales trilled in the woods, we came to Rosstrappe, one of the wildest regions I have seen; it was precipitous, and people walking down below were like dots. I cannot really visualize it now; but even on the spot, when I closed my eyes, I could not visualize it. The mind could not compass this depth, which imagination cannot create.’

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From Hans Christian Andersen – Danish Journal 1976