Canova: Sketching in Clay an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 11–October 9, 2023, and the Art Institute of Chicago, November 19, 2023–March 18, 2024.
Catalog of the exhibition by C. D. Dickerson III and Emerson Bowyer, with contributions by Anthony Sigel and Elyse Nelson.
National Gallery of Art/Art Institute of Chicago, 279 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press)
Antonio Canova was a fascinating mass of contradictions: a working-class child from the Venetian hinterland who became an arbiter of taste for the courts of Europe and a marquess in his own right; a shy man who hobnobbed with popes, kings, and learned women (and dared to give Napoleon a piece of his mind); the creator of impeccably polished marble statues and rough, vivacious models and sketches; and a master of classical style who has also been called, for good reason, the first modern sculptor. In his own day Canova was the object of a veritable cult that embraced both the man and his sublime creations. The patrons clamoring for his services included Pope Pius VII, Emperor Francis II of Austria, King George IV of England, Catherine the Great of Russia (whom he refused), and Napoleon, yet amid their demands and their clouds of flattery, he maintained a resolute independence that only drove his prestige higher.
In a Europe racked by war and social upheaval, Canova produced a dazzling succession of sculptures whose apparent classical perfection was almost always charged with a shiver of thoroughly modern eros. His fig leaves do not so much cover their heroes’ modesty as cling to it with preternatural impudence. The draperies in which he shrouds his men and women are so thin and sinuous that they reveal everything beneath—and then underline it all with a flourish.
Though he acquired his culture relatively late, he wielded mythology with wicked precision, especially when it came to the Bonaparte clan, which was guilty of and bywithdrawing into his own carefully calibrated version of the classical world. Convinced like Goya that “the sleep of reason begets monsters,” he clung to reason and his republican ideals. No wonder North Carolina appealed to him to carve a statue of George Washington for its statehouse. (Both the statue and the statehouse were unfortunately incinerated by a catastrophic fire in 1831.)
