Word: canova
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...contrast, Canova's drawings were usually mannered, and his paintings of dancers and mythological scenes are so overstyled that they look absurdly effete. Canova's imagination needed the resistance of solid material and got it, especially, from marble...
...though condemned to inferiority, the living artist could learn from his dead superiors, and what Canova extracted from Greek sculpture -- which he knew largely from Roman copies -- was its sense of grace and felicity, its subtle play of volumes and surfaces and its search for idealization within nature. He was not a "Roman" classicist, creating emblems of political virtue like Jacques-Louis David. From all we know of Canova, he never seems to have had a thought about politics -- which must have been an advantage for a man who worked for so many courts, papal and royal. Despite the mythological...
Given the high finish of his marbles, the roughness of his terra-cotta models comes as a surprise. In the first heat of exploring a motif, Canova worked as quickly and directly, almost, as Rodin, squeezing and knifing the clay to slab out the shapes. On occasions, he could compress a remarkable charge of emotion into these little studies: in one of them, the curve of the long neck of Antigone weeping over her dead brothers has much the same shape and, in miniature, some of the same tragic force as the woman's head in Picasso's Guernica...
...this medium Canova became a virtuoso almost from the start of his career, with a formidable talent for organizing the softness of flesh, the bulges and hollows of the body, the movement of windblown cloth into the live whiteness of the granular, crystalline, semitranslucent stone. Canova's desire to imitate Greek statuary by fusing the Ideal with the Real translates into a high degree of abstraction in the physical details of his sculpture -- smooth limbs with no warts, wrinkles or blemishes, and elaborate transitions that lead your eye around the figure or the group. The garland of six linked arms...
Amor and Psyche is the masterpiece of Canova's "graceful" style -- and, by any standards, one of the most spectacular technical tours de force in the history of stone carving. What is so extraordinary about it is the extremes to which Canova pushed the basic fact that a carved figure group is an arrangement of stone and air. Here, the empty spaces, the holes in the white love knot of figures, are as interesting as the limbs, bodies and heads. Walk round it and you see a kind of interstitial fugue of tunnels, gaps and fissures. No photograph can give...