Antonio Canova
The foremost sculptor of Neoclassicism.
Antonio Canova made marble as smooth as porcelain. Cupid and Psyche and his portrait of Napoleon's sister Pauline Borghese are among his best-known works.
Antonio Canova was born in 1757 in the village of Possagno in the Veneto region of Italy. His father, a stonemason, died when Antonio was small, and he was brought up by his paternal grandfather, also a stonemason. A wealthy senator spotted the boy's talent and paid for his training in Venice. There, early on, he made Daedalus and Icarus (1777–79), which is in the Museo Correr in Venice.
In 1781 Canova moved to Rome. There he encountered classical sculpture and Neoclassical ideas. His first major work in Rome was Theseus and the Minotaur (1781–83), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He soon received commissions from the popes and made funerary monuments to Clement XIV and Clement XIII, the latter in St Peter's. He became the most famous sculptor in Europe.
His best-known work is Cupid and Psyche (1787–93) in the Louvre, in which the god awakens his beloved with a kiss. Napoleon's sister Pauline Borghese had herself portrayed half-naked as Venus, reclining on a divan (1805–08). The sculpture is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Canova also made a colossal nude statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. It is now in Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington's house in London. The Three Graces (1814–17) exists in two versions, one in St Petersburg and one shared by museums in London and Edinburgh.
Canova worked with a large workshop. He first made a model in clay and plaster, and assistants then transferred the form to marble. He did the final work himself. He polished the surface until it was as smooth as skin and is said sometimes to have treated it with wax to give a soft sheen. He liked to show his sculptures by torchlight.
After Napoleon's fall in 1815 Canova was sent to Paris to negotiate the return of works of art the French had taken from Italy, and he was largely successful. He died in Venice in 1822. In Possagno he had a temple built, and his plaster models are displayed in a museum there. He is regarded as the foremost sculptor of Neoclassicism.