This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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On 13 October 1822, perhaps the most famous and lauded artist of the age breathed his last. The sculptor Antonio Canova had worked for popes, royalty and an emperor. He had sculpted the first president of the United States and made work for a British prime minister, and his patrons included nobles — old and new — across Europe.

No painter could touch him for renown, and many drew inspiration from his work. Writers too: Keats wrote an ode inspired by his 1787 statue Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (and, in an instance of one degree of separation, the morning after the poet’s death, his death mask was made by one of Canova’s assistants, a sculptor named Gherardi), while after visiting Rome in 1818, Lord Byron wrote admiringly that, “Italy has great names still … Europe — the world — has but one Canova.”

He had sculptural perfect pitch: his works had movement and purity of form

What so impressed his contemporaries was that Canova seemed to embody the spirit of antiquity revived. He had sculptural perfect pitch: his works had movement but without over-egging it and purity of form without descending into academic dryness.

Connoisseurs found human emotion in his sculpture and sensualists an appealing tactility. One client, the Duke of Bedford, called this “the morbidezza — that look of living softness given to the surface of the marble, which appears as if it would yield to the touch”. And he could work across registers: mythological, historical, religious, allegorical, memorial, portraiture — he commanded them all.

Nevertheless, sculpture is not held in the same regard today as in the neoclassical age and, as a result, Canova receives somewhat less than his due; paintings by contemporaries such as Delacroix or Thomas Lawrence have an obvious bravura that outmuscles Canova’s quieter virtues.

Canova’s importance was restated in 1989 when the Getty Museum bought his Three Graces, (1814-17) for $12.3 million and the British government was forced into some juggling with the export licence scheme to allow the work to be acquitted jointly by the V&A and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Christie’s hoped for a repetition of such a stellar price when in July of this year they put up for sale a lost Canova depicting The Recumbent Magdalene (1819) that had been bought unrecognised in 2002 for £5,200 as a nice piece of garden ornamentation. The statue carried an estimate of £8 million but this time failed to find a buyer.

Theseus and the Minotaur, was so convincing that it was assumed to be a copy of a lost Greek original

Canova was born in the Venetian Republic in 1757 and first came to attention as a young boy when, at a dinner party given by his grandfather, he carved a lion’s head out of butter. He served his apprenticeship in Venice before winning a stipend from the city that allowed him to travel round Italy.

He arrived in Rome in 1780 and his first major work there, Theseus and the Minotaur, was so convincing that it was assumed to be a copy of a lost Greek original. A series of important commissions followed, among them funerary monuments for popes Clement XIII and Clement XIV and the painter Titian. When the French invaded northern Italy it was Napoleon himself who guaranteed Canova’s safety and the continuation of his stipend.

In 1802, Pius VII ennobled him as Knight of the Golden Spur, but it was the Bonaparte family who became his most prominent patrons. He sculpted the emperor naked in the guise of a Roman god, as Napoleon as Mars
the Peacemaker, which ended up as a gift to the Duke of Wellington since Napoleon, who had wanted to be shown in a general’s uniform, rejected the buff personification as “too athletic”. And he showed Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese, as a naked deity too, as Venus Victrix (“Venus Victorious”). Josephine Bonaparte said that “this statue was formed by wearing out the marble that surrounded it with caresses and kiss”.

Canova’s relationship with Napoleon was double-edged however, since, as the Pope’s Inspector General of Antiquities and Fine Arts, his role was to protect Italy’s artworks, the cream of which Napoleon had plundered. He was working, in effect, for his nation’s despoiler. On Napoleon’s final exile, Canova was sent back to Paris to negotiate the return of numerous artworks and his efficacy won him the title of Marquis of Ischia and a substantial annual pension.

His other great contribution, however, was to British, rather than Italian, cultural heritage

His other great contribution, however, was to British, rather than Italian, cultural heritage. In 1803, Lord Elgin had asked him to restore the Parthenon marbles he was in the process of acquiring. Canova refused, for fear of damaging them, but in 1815 he visited London and saw them for the first time. He was entranced, finding them “truly flesh and blood”, and it was his recommendation and prestige that helped sway the government to buy them for the British Museum.

There was a footnote to his British influence too. In Rome, Canova taught the Welsh sculptor John Gibson who became a favourite of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. At the 1862 International Exhibition in London, Gibson showed his Tinted Venus, a sculpture designed to further his argument that the Greeks had originally painted their marbles. It became the most controversial statue of the time, attracting, said Cornhill Magazine, “a merciless running fire of remarks against it”. An aerated Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one detractor, saying she had “seldom … seen so indecent a statue” (what sins does that “seldom” cover, one wonders?).

So Canova, a gaunt but dandyish man, who hid his baldness under “a well-made toupee”, left his mark on more than just the statues that emerged beneath his chisels.