Word: canovas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From Goethe to Henry James, from Keats to Edgar Allan Poe, Canova haunted the imagination of writers, especially American ones. In fact the subject of Canova and America is large and includes such curiosities as a series of Canova sculptures of George Washington, naked as a jaybird, in the role of the classical pater patriae. Canova worked for politicians, princes, Popes and bankers, all of whom concurred that he was the modern Phidias. Now he is unloved, except by fans and specialists whose enthusiasm tends to be mistaken for some kind of fetishism. The mid-19th century shift to realism...
Since then, various attempts have been made to revive him, but none have really taken hold. The most recent, which may restore Canova to some popularity, is the sleeper of Venice's summer art season: a show of 152 drawings, clay models, plasters and finished marble carvings, borrowed from as far afield as St. Petersburg, handsomely installed in the period rooms of the Museo Correr on Piazza San Marco. It is 20 years since such a group of Canovas has been assembled in public...
...Canova is notoriously hard to love. It's not just that his marble carvings, finished to an extreme degree of perfection, run counter to the belief in the rugged, the unfinished and the visibly sincere that descends to us from Michelangelo and Rodin. Nor is it simply that one is anesthetized to him by his progeny -- the horde of slick, sentimental "classic" sculptors whose white memorials populate every 19th century graveyard in Europe. The basic reason is that Canova's assumptions about what sculpture ought to be and do, based on his total, adoring immersion in the ideal...
...wasn't that Canova imagined himself rivaling the Greeks; practically no one then imagined such a feat was possible. Works like the Apollo Belvedere, let alone the Parthenon marbles (which, abducted from Athens under a veneer of legal transaction by Lord Elgin, went on view in London in 1807), were beyond the reach of living talent; one could only marvel at what Canova, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles in 1815, called "the truth of nature conjoined to the choice of beautiful form -- everything here breathes life . . . with an exquisite artifice, without the slightest affectation or pomp...
...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...