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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 69

ART

Fugues in Stone and Air


BY ROBERT HUGHES

    SHOW: "Antonio Canova"
    WHERE: Museo Correr, Venice
    WHAT: Marble Carvings, Models and Drawings

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Long out of fashion and hard to love,
Canova was nevertheless a spectacularly gifted sculptor.


    "Bulls and greeks and lots of nekkid broads," wrote the
Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, reflecting on the nature of
classical sculpture. And who sums that up better than Antonio
Canova (1757-1822)? Canova is not to modern taste, and probably
never will be. When alive, he was the epitome of the
neoclassical style, the most admired marble carver in Europe;
connoisseurs shed tears of delight before his work. His Head of
Helen, Byron wrote, showed "Above the works and thoughts of Man/
What nature could, but would not, do,/ And beauty and Canova
can!"

    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, away from the neoclassical
ideal, did him in. The English taste for Canova, fulminated John
Ruskin, only went to show the decadence of the upper classes --
cold, mincing, overidealized, boring.

    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 of the Antique, are lost to us; try as
we may, we cannot feel the reverence for it that he did. For
Canova, the Antique was a truth mine. He visited every ancient
site in Italy he could get to -- Naples, Paestum, the newly
excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum; his connections gave
him access to private hoards of statuary from Rome to Venice.

    It 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."

    But 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
framework he employed, he was practicing an early kind of art
for art's sake, in which formal inflection and delicacy,
combined with an exquisite instinct for the equilibrium of
masses, reigned supreme.

    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.

    By 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.

    In 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
in The Three Graces, the largest carving lent by the Hermitage,
has just this rhythmical effect, and in its sense of continuous
movement one sees why Canova, in his prime, was credited with
inventing a new kind of beauty, Greek-based but original.

    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 more than the faintest idea of how this sculpture
unfolds, closes and changes under the moving eye.

    Not everything Canova did was on this level; how could it
have been? He was an extremely fashionable artist, and he paid
the price of fashion: his superrefined style slid into mannered
performance and self-repetition, abundantly represented in the
Museo Correr by a gallery of ideal heads. No matter. If this
show gives its visitors even a few reasons for looking at the
best of Canova without prejudice, it will have done its job; the
signs are that it has.