Following his interest in the subject matter as a young sculptor, Thorvaldsen created four reliefs in his later years studying the complicated iconography of the Genius of the seasons.

These four reliefs show the objects that the figure of the New Year's genius holds: 

the flower wreath from Childhood or spring , the seal and the cut ears of corn from Youth or summer , and the bunch of grapes from Manhood or autumn . These four reliefs are called the four seasons from the start , but they are also representations of our different ways of relating to sex and relationships throughout life.

In the childhood relief, it overflows with flowers, which the young, barely sexually mature girl can take freely. From both sides she is offered flowers, which here come to stand for her imminent entry into the ranks of fertile women. From the left comes a figure of Priapus , who uses his robe to carry flowers to her, thereby innocently and outrageously exposing his sex. To her right is an overflowing flower basket with a tambourine beside it. A very small boy child gives her a flower wreath made of flowers from the basket, a kind of maiden wreath or possibly a picture of the young woman's still unbroken virginity.

The image immediately changes in the subsequent relief, Youth or Summer , where there are again three figures, but now in a less fluid relationship to each other . A game has come between the three figures. In a sort of recreation of the Judgment of Paris, where Prince Paris must choose which of the goddesses he thinks is the most beautiful and give her the apple, the young man in the middle holds an apple. But he doesn't just hold the apple, he holds the apple at arm's length, away from the young woman whom he simultaneously pulls towards him from the left. She holds a sack , and a game unfolds between her harvesting tool and his freedom to choose which woman he wants to designate as the most beautiful. There is a third figure on the relief, a woman on her knees cutting grain. She looks up at the couple and mirrors the standing woman. The braids are now not in a bun on the head, but tied around the neck, not like a hairstyle we know, but like a kind of chain. The braids mimic the pattern of the grain she is cutting, and her sickle is placed in the same oblique line as that of the standing woman. The grain she harvests is placed in the neg behind the standing woman. It is as if we see here the inevitable consequence of the relationship and sexual life: the man's fertility, symbolized by the grain, is harvested by the woman, who can process it and transform it into something else. Conversely, this work fetters and subjugates the woman, so that the two sexes are harvested (or, with a more negative connotation, castrated) in different ways: the man as grain and the woman who processes it, having it tied around her neck like a chain. The two sexes have different roles, the man harvests and the woman harvests. The grain here stands for the man's sperm, with which the woman is fertilized in the form of the sexual act and processed in the same way as grain becomes flour and then bread,

If we look at the subsequent relief, Manhood or Autumn , it is further clarified. The consequence or result of their sacrifice has come into view: the child. The grain has been processed and has become a child, which is now looked after and fed by the woman. This is about family life and the fully domesticated couple. There is suddenly architecture in the background, a faithful dog follows the man, who has just returned home with hunting spoils. In his hand he holds a bunch of grapeswhich he has picked from the vine that grows by the house. The grapes are, like the grain, a crop that can be processed and refined, but a wildness is also attached to the grapes, because they are the fruit of the god Bacchus. Grapes are thus also the fruit of intoxication, sex drive, rapture, ecstasy. The man is about to take a grape to his mouth, parallel to the child about to eat from the woman's breast.

Precisely the bunch of grapes from the autumn/manhood relief is so strongly emphasized on New Year's genius , where it points to the sign of the scorpion, more on this later. From the other two reliefs, Thorvaldsen has reused the wreath (childhood/spring), the grain and the seal (youth/summer). He therefore reuses elements that have already been given a meaning via other reliefs, but he moves them around and gives them a new context and thus new meaning.

But where does old age or winter go? On New Year's genius, Thorvaldsen does not reuse any of the attributes seen on the old age/winter relief. Here, two old men in heavy clothes sit around a table, warming themselves, together with a cat, by a basin. On the table is a jug and an oil lamp, which the woman is about to light. Behind them hangs a mysterious cloth on a clothesline, like a shroud threatening to fall over the man's face - death approaching. In New Year's genius , winter is represented by the skates, but it is a long way from this scene to the figure of the boy on skates, braving the freezing cold completely naked. The cold-hearted old men from old age or winterhas turned into a naked boy on skates. Common to the two reliefs is the cold, but it is released in two very different ways: one facing death and fighting against the cold, the other youthfully bearing the harvest of life and the year .