By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

November 2013

Vol. 155 / No. 1328

Canova

Reviewed by Satish Padiyar

WHAT HAS THE stunning violence of Michelangelo’s Battle of the centaurs, made in the spring of 1492 and now in the Casa Buonarroti, to do with Canova’s suave Empire Venus Italica in the Pitti Palace? What does a shocking iconography of body-smashing and a youthful sculptural practice that everywhere leaves traces of an immense struggle with materiality by the sculptor who is the epitome of non finito to do with that of Canova’s achieved grace and ultima mano? If Michelangelo exposed the psychic struggle and the physical danger involved in making beauty like no artist before or since, might putting Canova next to Michelangelo alert us afresh to the later sculptor’s struggle with his material, to the dimension of sheer labour, both mental and physical, that produced and yet immediately was denied by the seductions of the Canovian ‘untroubled’ surface (denied too by the artist’s famously blithe self-composure)? Could there be a reading of Canova that is alert to the violence implicit in his striving to manufacture a modern beauty?

Such questions were unanswered by the exhibition Canova. La Bellezza e la Memoria at the Casa Buonarroti, Florence (closed 21st October). This was odd, because in it some thirty-four drawings and several plaster casts and mixed-media works by Canova, all from the collection and the archive of the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa, were installed on the ground floor of the house, only one floor away from the work of Michelangelo, for whom Canova professed profound admiration. Instead, the exhibition’s curator, Giuliana Ericani, in bringing to Casa Buonarroti selected objects from the Bassano del Grappa archives, proposed to expose to view a Florentine Canova: this usefully shifted attention away from the much-exhibited Canova of a Venice–Rome axis, in order, as the exhibition publicity stated, to bring back Canova to Florence. Consequently, the exhibition was bracketed by an examination of two of Canova’s Florentine projects, his Venus Italica (1804–12; cat. no.9b) and his Monument to Vittorio Alfieri (1806–10) in the nearby church of S. Croce (the exhibition offered a combined ticket to link its presentation of drawings and preparatory work for Alfieri to the completed monument), thus presenting a Canova that in these years equivocated between the felicity of beauty and the searing sense of loss in mourning and memory.

As one entered the ground-floor rooms of Casa Buonarroti, one was confronted by a plaster cast of Venus Italica: badly installed, it was raised barely two inches above the ground by an over-designed curlicued plinth and circumscribed at waist level by ungainly thick protective ropes. For this opening section Giuliana Ericani sensitively selected a group of Canova’s large drawings of the female nude – presented uncontroversially as indebted to Correggio and Prud’hon rather than to Michelangelo, although it appears to me that there was at least one torso among them that indicated a subtle reworking of Michelangelo (no.2d). Eschewing any systematic presentation of the preparatory work and thought processes that led to the marble Venus Italica, the aim here was to present Canova’s new conception of the female nude, which, as the wall text (by Ericani) claimed, was anchored in the classical ideal, but took on a powerful dimension of sensuality. Yet a comparison between the highly worked generic drawings and the various replications of Venus Italica (its plaster version, a pen drawing made after the marble, the Marchetti engraving, the marble itself – the latter not in the exhibition but not far away in the Pitti Palace) reveals significant variations in treatment, rather than a unitary modern type of female beauty: this may reveal something about the link between Canova’s private feelings and the public context of this marble. The more expansive of the drawings can present a female nude as an open form (no.2c; Fig.52), confidently inhabiting the page: the look of the model is engaging, her body assertively thrown out towards the viewer. By contrast the Venus Italica is an insistently closed form. In fact, the juxtaposition brought it out as, rather like an Ingres nude, strangely ugly, with its exaggerated hunch, its furtive look, its tortuous juxtapositions (from the back, the thick stump of twisted flesh that forms the join between the serpentine back and the free-floating ‘classical’ head), and its insistently – paranoically – closed legs. These more disturbing qualities, quite ignored in the presentation of the exhibition and in the catalogue essays, pulled one back to the politics of the Venus Italica. They raise the question of the possibility that in its distortions this is a female ‘beauty’ that symptomatically responds to the experience of the rape of Italy by the invading Napoleonic French whom Canova deplored; that Canova produced Venus Italica as a dark, cowed and huddling figure to embody urgent self-protectiveness as much as felicitous ‘beauty’.

Between bellezza and memoria, two rooms were devoted to ‘Grace and the Graces’ and ‘The Female Portrait’. ‘Grace and the Graces’ moved away from the gravity-bound, almost oppressive fleshiness of Venus Italica, to a group of drawings and mixed-media works on canvas that displayed Can­ova’s enduring fascination with the figure of dance and with the leaping, free airborne body. Here Ericani skilfully exposed the links between different projects, such as Hebe, Amor and Psyche and the Three Graces, which Canova’s drawings subtly revealed (she argues in her catalogue essay for his drawings to be classed as ‘pensieri nascosti’, ‘private thoughts’).1 Ultimately, however, the section lacked cogency, since ‘grace’ was presented as so pervasive among different projects as to become almost meaningless as a driving concept for the rather loose ensemble of works displayed. The next room’s juxtaposition of the plaster modello of the head of Lepoldina Esterházy Lichtenstein (and an associated portrait drawing and engraving of the completed marble; no.12) with the plaster of the ideal Head of Helen (no.13) – the one outward-looking, worldly and confidently performative as a public writer, the other all a-worldly introspection – nicely rounded off the first term of the exhibition, bellezza, by exposing real active women as the foremost proponents of this sculptor’s modern type of beauty.

Certainly it was the female patron of the Alfieri Monument, Louisa von Stolberg, Countess of Albany, who emboldened Can­ova to create that most abstractly severe of monuments, located in S. Croce between those to Dante and Machiavelli (Michelangelo is two tombs away). The final section of the exhibition grouped the preparatory drawings that show how Canova responded to her call (she was displeased with his first ideas). He systematically reduced the initial and more conventional ensemble of three allegorical figures – Cupid, Mourning Italy, and the ephebic Genius of Death – and the portrait bust of the deceased (no.17b; Fig.53) to a radical simplification in which the now isolated grieving woman simply draws a shrouding veil across the portrait medallion on the tomb. Taking a cue from Carlo Sisi’s catalogue essay, the exhibition here investigated what Sisi terms a ‘sepulchral beauty’, and it provided the exhibition with a clim­atic – and perhaps surprisingly, deeply moving – conclusion, with a group of drawings, engravings and maquettes for monuments, and mixed-media canvases, that explored Canova’s wider fascination with the figure of the mourner who is left behind by death (this figure being reprised in the monuments to John Frank Newton, to Titian, to Angelo Emo, and to Alfieri): a Canovian post-Enlightenment figure who, deprived of the consolations of the spiritual, merely stands or sits, grieving before statues (no.14c; Fig.54).

The catalogue essays sometimes ignored to their detriment the relevant non-Italian publications and more recent Anglo-American scholarship on Canova and on Enlightenment sculpture.2 Yet the exhibition itself did succeed in building substance out of Can­ova’s relatively fleeting Florentine sojourn, and placed him securely back on an itinerary of Florence, if not exactly in the footsteps of Michelangelo.

1    Catalogue: Canova. La Bellezza e la Memoria. Edited by Giuliana Ericani and Francesco Leone, with essays by Giuliana Ericani, Arnaldo Bruni and Carlo Sisi. 158 pp. incl. 45 col. + 90 b. & w. ills. (Palombi Editori, Rome, 2013), €22. ISBN 978–88–6060–540–5.
2    Absent, for example, from the catalogue and its bibliography is Erika Naginski’s important rethinking of the theory and practice of Enlightenment funerary sculpture; E. Naginski: Sculpture and Enlightenment, Los Angeles 2009; and Johannes Myssok on Canova’s post-1800 sculptures of female beauty as driven by competition with Thorvaldsen; J. Myssok: Antonio Canova. Die Erneuerung der klassischen Mythen in der Kunst um 1800, Petersberg 2007, esp. pp.299–300 on Venus Italica.