The monument was commissioned by a committee working at the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Science, headed by Stanisław Staszic. Despite the submission of designs by Polish sculptors, it was decided to choose Bertel Thorvaldsen, one of the most prominent European sculptors of the time. The commission was quite detailed. As we read in the contract concluded between him and Staszic on 30 September 1820, it was supposed to be ‘a statue of colossal size, seated on a chair, clad in an academic gown, holding an armillary sphere in one hand, with eyes turned towards the heavens’.
Thorvaldsen, a Danish artist with Icelandic roots permanently based in Rome, took on the task, although the work dragged on considerably. It involved the preparation of a plaster model, which was ready in December 1827. On its basis, John Baptiste Grégoire made a bronze cast. Such a practice was common and shows who was considered the creator at the time – the author of the idea and the composition, which materialised in the form of a plaster model. The making of the bronze version, on the other hand, was regarded as an important but rather artisanal activity, for which the artist himself was no longer responsible.
The sculptor fulfilled the expectations set out in the contract. The statue depicts a seated figure of Copernicus placed on a plinth with inscriptions. The astronomer is dressed in an academic gown, which also appears in other images of him. This was a permanent element of the iconography associated with him, emphasising that he was first and foremost a scholar, a man of the university, and not just a priest or administrator of estates. In his left hand he holds the aforementioned armillary sphere (also known as a spherical astrolabe), while in his right he holds an astronomical compass.
The astronomer looks ahead, with his eyes slightly raised towards the sky. The manner in which the sculptor portrayed Copernicus’s face, although alluding to well-known portraits of the astronomer at the time, has individual features. Copernicus looks younger and has a different hairstyle – less luxuriant and dense, thus giving him a calmer and timeless expression. This idealisation, as Hanna Kotkowska-Bareja wrote in her book Pomnik Kopernika (The Copernicus Monument) dedicated to the work, resulted from classical principles in which ‘both the face and the figure should have ideal features, while the artist’s most important task was to record what was great and eternal in Copernicus’.