Antonio Canova's white goddess

“Conquering Venus” is the centrepiece of an exhibit of work by the sculptor who transcended time. From Wanted in Rome By Edith Schloss December 5, 2007 A gleaming white marble figure, elegantly reclining on a marble cushion, has always been the centrepiece, the icon, of the Villa Borghese museum, a treasure trove that is rivaled only by the Medici collection in the Uffizi gallery in Florence and the enormous hoard of the tsars in the Hermitage of St Petersburg. The Borghese princes from Siena who settled in Rome in one of its most perfect villas in the early 17th century, brought together not only a vast assembly of Roman and Greek sculpture, which had recently been dug up in the city, but also Renaissance works and pieces from their own time. The exquisite building became the private showcase for the delectation of informed visitors through the ages. In 1902, when the Italian government acquired it, it was opened to the general public. It was in 1804 that prince Camillo Borghese commissioned the most celebrated sculptor of the period to begin a sculpture of his new wife. She was not an aristocrat like himself, but the sister of a conqueror. She was Pauline Bonaparte. The sculptor was Antonio Canova, a brave worker devoted to his craft, famed for his fabulous final touch, believed to make cold stone come alive. Canova (1757-1822) was born in Possagno in the Veneto, the offspring of several generations of stonecutters. When the Venetian senator Giovanni Falier observed him in his grandfather’s marble yard he recognized his talent. He brought him to Venice to study at the academy and became his patron. In his early works Canova still followed the contortions of the Baroque, recently enhanced by the sagesse of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Eventually, like other young artists dazzled by the new finds of ancient art discovered in Pompei, he tried to seize classical values, to turn them into a new palatable style, exactly fashioned to the requirements of his own period – neo-classicism. Timeliness is something ineffable. In Canova, the bland faces of his adolescent models, the icy planes of their over-studied poses, his display of ardent craftsmanship, his terrible smoothness, make you shiver. We have trouble with any period style running counter to our own. The “Conquering Venus”, the pearl of Canova’s output, celebrating its 200th birthday, is not easy to face for the modern visitor at first. Nor are all the amorini, nymphs and gods who have been travelling from the finest museums all over the world to join her. Against the splendour of the background of the regular Borghese collection, the Raphaels, Titians, Correggios, Caravaggios, Berninis etc, they are beautifully and clearly displayed, in a state-of-the-art manner. We look at a “Venus” standing, an “Apollo”, a “Terpsichore”, an “Endymion”, “Amor and Psyche” cherishing a little butterfly of marble, bare little boys and big girls, portraits of matrons. All of them, naiads and nymphs and gods from lost Arcadia, are life-size, have long lines of legs, high bosoms and long curved bottoms and dainty fingers. Their precise heads are very small. Now look at the “Three Graces”, made between 1812 and 1814 after a painting of Raphael, for Tsar Alexander I, who took it to St Petersburg. (A second version was commissioned by the Duke of Bedford and now graces the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.) It is a group of three bodies hewn from one great square block of Carrara marble. A composition of limbs is scooped out from a solid. There is an interstice, a void, in the middle, around which a concentration of shapes must weave a fake fluidity. This is a very complex thing: not something built up, but something cut down. It is a balancing of closed with empty space, made according to an exact plan, according to imaginative insight. From a spatial idea, a concept, Canova proceeded to create a clear structural definition. You might regard him as a conceptual artist. When you look through the outer old-style timeliness, you find an astute inventive artist, clear-sighted and tough. It is exhilarating when you understand the drama created by a lump of stone, transcending time. Canova said: “Terracotta is life. Plaster is death. Marble is resurrection.” His terracotta maquettes, of a penitent “Magdalen”, a sitting “Madam Mère” – Napoleon’s deeply influential mother – a superbly swift embrace of “Amor and Psyche”, also make him amiable. The paintings and drawings are a bit clumsy, touchingly uncertain, as if, used to fighting the bitter resistance of stubborn stone, Canova found mere marks on canvas or paper too little to worry about. In the end, the “Conquering Venus”, the sculpture which is elevating Paulette, the vixen from Corsica, is a grandiose abstraction, a willful distillation of life. In real life she was brown, rosy, capricious, a flirt to the end. Not the least bit bothered having to pose naked and exhibit herself, she lies as if purring under the scrutiny of the pensive artist, proudly holding and beholding the apple of Paris, her triumph, in her slender fingers. Here she is exalted. Here she lies in gentle transport, her elegant legs crossed, tender bosom high, lips slightly open in her chiseled profile – chaste and idealized – the white goddess. A fine stone made civilizing beauty. Canova e la Venere Vincitrice. Until 3 Feb 2008. Galleria Borghese, Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, tel. 068413979. 09.00-19.00. Mon closed. Booking compulsory