Details of Sculptor

Surname

Canova

Alternative Surname

First Name

Antonio

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1757

Flourished

Year of Death

1822

Biographical Details

A sculptor, painter, architect and diplomat, Canova was in his day the most celebrated artist in Europe. Although he was only in Britain briefly towards the end of his career, he was closely connected with a network of British patrons, sculptors, connoisseurs, and admirers from an early period, and he exercised a considerable influence on the development of British sculpture.
He was born at Possagno, near Treviso on 1 November 1757, the son of Pietro Canova, a stonecutter. In 1768 he was apprenticed to the sculptor Giuseppe Bernardi in Pagnano, near Asolo, and he followed his master to Venice, where he worked in the studio of the sculptor Giovanni Ferrari and studied at the Venice Academy. In 1775 he set up a studio in Venice and during the next four years executed a number of works for members of the leading Venetian families. In October 1779 Canova set off on his first journey from Venice to Rome, pausing for a few days in Florence where he visited the studio of Francis Harwood.
Canova appears to have cultivated close ties with the British and Irish communities in Rome. One of his early champions was the Scottish painter, archaeologist and connoisseur, Gavin Hamilton, whose studio Canova visited in January 1780. In June 1780, in company with the sculptor Giuseppe Angelini, Hamilton viewed the plaster cast of Canova’s Daedalus and Icarus (Correr, Venice), a cast that Canova had sent to the Venetian ambassador in Rome, Girolamo Zulian, as a demonstration of his skill. Hamilton, who admired the work for its naturalism, was one of those who persuaded Zulian to invite Canova to Rome on a more permanent basis, so that the sculptor could study the ‘true’ (neoclassical) style. Zulian gave Canova a block of marble to carve as he wished and provided him with a studio in Palazzo di Venezia. Canova chose as his subject Theseus and the Minotaur, but after modelling a composition of the two figures in combat, he accepted Hamilton’s advice and carved a static group of the hero calmly seated on the body of the dead monster. The work, which demonstrated sound neoclassical principles and established Canova’s fame in Rome, was sold to an Austrian buyer through whose family it finally passed to England (7).
During the 1780s Canova drew on Hamilton’s paintings for a series of reliefs of subjects from the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. In 1783 Hamilton recommended Canova as executant for the monument to Pope Clement XIV Ganginelli in SS Apostoli, his first major commission. A commission for a second papal tomb, to Clement XIII, followed in the same year (St Peter’s, Rome). Hamilton strongly advised Canova to turn from traditional formulae for papal monuments and instead to pursue a more independent aesthetic, based on the study of Nature and the masterpieces of antique Greek sculpture. A portrait bust of the pontiff by Christopher Hewetson, a friend of Canova since 1780, provided guidelines for Canova’s representation and the tomb’s completion was celebrated at a party given by Hewetson in 1787.
By the mid-1780s Canova was beginning to attract the attention of English visitors. In March 1784 the diarist Miss Berry visited his studio and reported that he was doing ‘wonders in the way of sculpture’ and that his Theseus rivalled the masterpieces of antiquity (Honour 1959, 227). His first and most loyal British patron was Colonel John Campbell, later Lord Cawdor (8, 10, 11, 16, 18, 30), who in 1787 commissioned a statue of Amorino (8), the first of Canova’s works to arrive in England, and also ordered a delicate and erotic Cupid Awakening Psyche, much admired as an innovative interpretation (10). Another enthusiastic English collector, Henry Blundell, bought a Psyche from Canova, to be housed with his Antiquities in purpose-built galleries at Ince in Lancashire (9). In 1790 the sculptor was approached by Frederick Hervey, the Earl-Bishop of Derry, who offended the Italian by complaining, in the sculptor’s company, that his prices were too high. Despite the Earl-Bishop’s retractions and flattering correspondence Canova steadfastly refused to work for him after this slight. Nevertheless, Canova was always generous in his promotion of other sculptors, and it was he who recommended John Flaxman RA to the Earl-Bishop. In 1792 Canova was learning English: his notebook with copies from the correspondence of Alexander Pope and useful conversational phrases is preserved at Bassano (Honour (ed) 1994, 231-250).
Canova’s reputation continued to grow during the French Revolutionary Wars when the British were unable to travel on the Continent, but after the short-lived Peace of Amiens, 1802, they returned briefly to Rome. Sir Simon Houghton Clarke, a Jamaican plantation owner, asked for versions of the Antique pugilists, Creugas and Damoxenos (Vatican), and Adam Ferguson, the Edinburgh philosopher and historian, offered a price of £2000 for a statue of the Scottish politician Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville. The resumption of the French wars prevented the execution of both these commissions.
Canova’s most illustrious patrons during the wars were the Emperor Napoleon and his family, but commissions from Britain’s enemy did not prevent negotiations for a statue of William Pitt the Younger for the Senate House, Cambridge. The initiative came from the 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who was authorised by the Pitt Monument Committee to make enquiries as to whether Canova would be interested in undertaking the work. Despite an encouraging response from the sculptor the committee were lukewarm about the prospect of employing Canova without his coming to England, and an outcry against the possibility by British artists led to the approach being abandoned. The commission went to Joseph Nollekens RA. A second significant attempt to enlist Canova’s services, for the monument to Admiral Nelson in St Paul’s Cathedral, was championed in The Director by the MP and dilettante Charles Francis Greville. Canova provided a model for a severe, free-standing sarcophagus, decorated with allegories of Nelson’s birth, death and apotheosis (2). Again there was an angry response to the suggestion that native sculptors were incapable of providing an appropriate work. The commission eventually went to John Flaxman.
After the Napoleonic wars, visits to Canova’s studio in Vicolo delle Colonette di San Giocomo degli Incurabili once again became popular with British tourists, who regularly recorded their impressions of the great man’s workplace in their journals and letters. Lord Cawdor visited in January 1815 with the Duke of Bedford, who ordered his own version of the Three Graces , a subject Canova was then carving for the son of Napoleon's first wife, the Empress Josephine (20). Canova took the opportunity to improve upon his first interpretation and this sensuous masterpiece has, as the Duke of Bedford hoped, become the cornerstone of Canova’s reputation in Britain.
In August 1815 the Roman Senate sent Canova to Paris to negotiate for the return of works of art removed by Napoleon’s armies during the Italian campaigns. Canova’s success in his mission, as he later acknowledged, was due largely to the support of the Duke of Wellington, Viscount Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, and particularly Castlereagh’s Under-Secretary of State William Richard Hamilton. Arguing the moral case and the principle of the inviolability of property, the British delegation succeeded in forcing the French to return the priceless antiquities, and gave Canova 250,000 franchi to cover the costs of packaging and transport. As a mark of his gratitude Canova later presented ‘ideal heads’ to Wellington, Castlereagh, Hamilton and Charles Long, the Paymaster General (31-34).
In late October 1815 Canova made his first and only visit to England with his half-brother, Giovanni Battista Sartori. The visit lasted a little over a month and was prompted, at least in part, by an invitation to give his opinion on the Elgin Marbles at a time when the British government were contemplating their purchase. Canova’s report was appended to the report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons. Canova professed to admire their animation, expression and concealed skill so much that he would have been ‘perfectly contented with having come to London on their account alone’ (Visconti 1816, xxii). His visit also encompassed a number of glamorous social encounters, probably engineered by his friend WR Hamilton, including an official visit to Downing Street and a farewell ball in which he was presented to the Prince Regent. He also made an array of social visits to collections, patrons, artists and acquaintances made in Rome. Canova visited Westminster Abbey, the Townley marbles in the British Museum, the Shelburne marbles at Lansdowne House, Thomas Hope’s collection in Duchess Street, Richard Payne Knight’s collection, the Royal Society in Somerset House, Hampton Court and Windsor Castle. In St Paul’s Cathedral he admired the work of John Bacon RA and of John Bacon II, on whom he subsequently paid a visit. He called on his patrons, Sir Simon Houghton Clarke at High Barnet and the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, in the company of his long-standing friend Sir Richard Westmacott RA and the architect Jeffrey Wyatt, who later built the Woburn temple for the Three Graces. Westmacott also accompanied Canova to Holland House, Ashridge Park and to Bromley Hill, Kent, the home of Sir Charles Long.
The Royal Academy was slow to issue an invitation to Canova, perhaps, as Benjamin Robert Haydon suggested, because the Academicians were suspicious that the Italian had come to London to attract national commissions. JCF Rossi RA, who knew Canova in Rome, propagated this rumour and it gained such currency that Canova’s allies took pains to rebut it in the press. An RA dinner was eventually held in his honour on 1 December, a few days before his departure, when he charmed the company. Sir Thomas Lawrence told Farington that he considered ‘the manners of Canova a pattern for an artist’ and that ‘he had modest but manly deportment’ (Farington, vol 13, 4746). Canova’s social graces won him many friends and his views on a range of topics, from the Raphael cartoons and the architecture of Waterloo Bridge to the view of London from Sydenham, were meticulously recorded by witnesses. Canova’s own brief notes of his visit appear in his manuscript, Appunti sul Viaggio in Inghilterra (1815).
He left London on 5 December, returning to Rome, where, in recognition of his services, the Pope created him Marchese d’Ischia. He paid tribute to his English hosts in the following year, when, in his capacity as Perpetual President of the Academy of St Luke in Rome, he arranged for Lawrence, Flaxman, Henry Fuseli and Benjamin West to be elected members. He also supervised the preparation of twenty-nine casts of antiquities from the Vatican collections, which were given to the Prince Regent by the Pope. The Prince Regent proposed to house the casts in the British Institution, but Lawrence persuaded the Prince that the RA’s special bond with Canova made the Academy their more fitting home. It was rumoured that the government had given £5,000 to Canova to found a British school of painting in Rome (GM, April 1816, vol 86, pt 1, 364).
Canova provided no national monuments in Britain, but his charm and known skills won him important patrons and encouraged a special affection between the British art world and the Italian sculptor. The Prince Regent himself gave a major sum towards the monument in St Peter’s, Rome, commemorating the Stuart line (4), and he also commissioned a group of Mars and Venus as an allegory of the advent of European peace (24). In 1817, in a spirit of triumphalism, the nation bought Canova’s statue of Napoleon as Mars and presented it to the Duke of Wellington (14).
The Royal Academy agreed to exhibit Canova’s Hebe and Terpsichore (16,17), both owned by British patrons, in 1817. The display of these lightly polychromed figures acted as a public showcase for Canova’s work and he received commissions from Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Liverpool and notably, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, who by his own admission became ‘famished’ for Canova’s work (Watson 1957, 406), and was not sated until he had bought six major pieces (12, 16, 25, 28, 35, 42).
Canova’s activities were followed in the British press and a major new work, the colossal equestrian statue of Ferdinand IV (Naples), was one of those eagerly described in the Gentleman’s Magazine (GM, September 1820, vol 90, pt 2, 255). Lord Byron, who had earlier celebrated in verse Canova’s bust of Helen (1811, Albrizzi Palace, Venice), wrote a prefatory passage eulogising the sculptor before Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). Casts of Canova’s work reached a popular market through Benjamin and Robert Shout of Holborn. In Rome, Canova continued to pay special attention to British travellers, taking Thomas Lawrence and Francis Chantrey RA on one occasion for a private candlelit viewing of his statue of Pauline Borghese (Borghese Palace, Rome). Canova’s insistence on personal control of the conception and finish of a work were recorded in Mrs Eaton’s Rome in the 18th Century... (1820), and his aesthetic of eroticised mythology, high finish and subtly tinted marble had an important influence on a number of British sculptors, including Sir Richard Westmacott, E H Baily RA, Lawrence Macdonald, Thomas Campbell, R J Wyatt and John Gibson RA. Gibson spent five years using Canova’s studio in Rome, and was subsequently recommended by the Italian to British patrons.
In the early 1820s a small group of British connoisseurs, including the Earl of Minto and Lord Dunstanville, began to decry Canova’s work, choosing instead to champion the more austere compositions of Bertel Thorvaldsen. Thomas Lawrence probably spoke for the majority however, when he retorted that the Dane was ‘much inferior’ to Canova, ‘the ablest sculptor that had appeared since the Greeks’ (Farington vol 16, 5677).
The news of Canova’s death in Venice on 13 October 1822 shook the Italian people, who mourned him as a liberal benefactor, patron, and an honour to his age and country. Canova’s heart was preserved in a monument in the Frari church, Venice, his right hand in a vase at the Venice Academy, and the rest of his body in the mausoleum at Possagno, which the sculptor had designed and decorated with his own paintings and sculpture. Shortly after his death, Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire organised a subscription to build a monument in Rome. This latter project, which was to be overseen by Thorvaldsen and partly carved by Pietro Tenerani, aborted when the new Pope, Leo XII, withdrew his support for its construction.
John Flaxman’s Address on the Death of Canova, delivered at the Royal Academy in 1822, stressed the extent to which Canova had begun to be thought of as an adoptive Briton: ‘This sculptor… has a claim to the affectionate regard of Englishmen in particular, not only by his strong attachment to the institutions and manners of our country, but by his polite and careful attentions to our countrymen in Italy, of whom I believe it may be truly said, that no English traveller ever sought a reasonable service from Signor Canova in vain’ (Flaxman 1838, 296-7).
He was the subject of numerous memoirs and biographies in Italian and the knowledge of his oeuvre was extended in England with the publication of an English edition of Countess Isabella Albrizzi’s Opere di scultore e di plastica di Antonio Canova. This was published as The Works of Antonio Canova, with engravings after the original plates by Henry Moses (1822-4). The sculpture galleries of Woburn and Chatsworth were centred around his sculpture and casts of 19 of his works were placed for teaching purposes in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Victorian sensibilities led to anxieties about the carnality of Canova’s statues. Mrs Fox of Penjerrick feared the works might arouse dangerous animalistic passions (Fox 1882, 67) and John Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice, famously argued that the glorification of sensuality in marble was a symptom of the degeneracy of the English upper classes. Lord Holland’s account of the arrival of the semi-nude Sleeping Endymion at Devonshire House in July 1823 suggests a frisson, for it was ‘exhibited much to the real or affected horror of some ladies’ (Fox 1923, 172).
The interest in Canova, his role in the development of European neoclassicism and his relationship with the British, revived in the second half of the 20th century, particularly through the work of Hugh Honour. The Woburn Three Graces attracted a new audience for the sculptor's work between 1988 and 1994, when a series of government interventions prevented its sale to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Eventually a fund-raising campaign secured the work for the National Galleries of Scotland and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Canova’s correspondence with British friends and patrons between 1816 and 1817 has recently been published in volume 18 of the Edizione Nazionale of the sculptor’s writings.
The following list of works consists only of those commissioned or contributed to by British patrons, works presented by Canova to British friends, one design for a British state memorial, and pieces bought by British collectors during Canova’s lifetime. Canova published his own Catalogo cronologico delle sculture di Antonio Canova in Rome in 1816, with an addendum in 1819, in order to avoid erroneous attributions of his work. This was updated at the time of Canova’s death in 1823 by Leopoldo Cicognara and was subsequently used by Melchior Missirini and later writers. Serious doubt is therefore cast on works such as the monuments at Speen and Elvaston (1, 5), which are not included in these lists, even if inscribed and based on Canova’s designs.
MGS
Literary References: Farington, passim; Visconti 1816, xxii; GM 1816, vol 86, pt 1, 555, 630; 1836, vol 159, 186; Passavant 1836, passim; Hartmann 1955, 205-35; Watson 1957, 403-6; Honour 1959, 241-5, 225-31; Honour 1962, 137-8; Neoclassicism 1972, 195-214; JKB 1974 (1), 982-4; Pavanello 1976; Liscombe 1977, 700-705; Read 1982, passim; Licht 1983; Whinney 1988, passim; Clifford 1995; Honour (ed) 1994; Busco 1994, 21, 175 n103; Grove 5, 1996, 625-33 (Pavanello); Ingamells 1997, 176-7; Eustace 1997 (2); Baker 2000, 159-168; Yarrington 2000, 132-155; Clifford 2000, 3-12; Yarrington 2002, 30-43; Honour and Mariuz (eds) 2002; Wilson 2003, 74
Archival References: Appunti sul Viaggio in Inghilterra (MS 6087, Bassano, Museo Civico), transcribed, annotated and reproduced in Honour (ed) 1994, 383-394; Canova/Castlereagh; Canova/Sir Richard Westmacott VAM; Canova/Sir Richard Westmacott NY Met; Canova/Lawrence (one of these letters, dated 20 March 1820, transcribed in George 1996, 30-1); Canova/Bedford; Canova/Cawdor; Canova/Hamilton; Canova/Wellington
Selected Portraits of the Sculptor: Hugh Douglas Hamilton Antonio Canova in his Studio with Henry Tresham and a Plaster Model for the Cupid and Psyche, 1788-9, pastel, VAM E.406-1998, Clifford 1995, 8 (repr); John Bacon II, 1815, pencil, private coll, Clifford 1995, 14 (repr); Thomas Phillips, drawing, 1815, etched by Mary Turner, 1815, Eustace 1997 (2), 25, 26 (repr); Richard Reinagle, drawing, 1815, untraced, Eustace 1997 (2), 26; John Flaxman, drawing, 1815, untraced, Eustace 1997 (2), 26; Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1815-18, oil on canvas, Gipsoteca, Possagno, Clifford 1995, frontispiece (approximately 20 versions and copies known, Eustace 1997 (2), 95-6); George Hayter, 1817, oil on canvas, Gov Art Coll (British Embassy, Paris), Clifford 1995, 18, 87 (repr); Henry Rossi, bust, 1817, untraced; Raimondo Trentanove, marble bust after Canova’s self-portrait, several versions including Woburn Abbey, Beds; W Ewing, ivory portrait, 1820, untraced