ANTONIA CANOVA,
The greatest of modern sculptors, was born in a mud-walled cabin of an Alpine valley within the Venetian territories; and remained in the care of Pasino, his grandfather, who was a stone-cutter, till his twelfth year. Pasino, evermore employing enticement and tenderness rather than compulsion began to instruct the child in drawing, as soon as his little hand could hold a pencil; and even taught him to model in clay at an early age. At nine years old, however, he was set to work at stone-cutting; and, thenceforward, his essays in art were but pursued as relaxations. Yet his boyish performances were sufficiently remarkable to attract notice from the chief of the patrician family of Falieri, for whom Pasino worked. This nobleman took young Canova under his patronage, and placed him with Toretto, a sculptor. His new preceptor was not very liberal in his instructions; but the young genius secretly pursued his high bent, and one day surprised Toretto by producing the figures of two angels of singular beauty. His yearnings after excellence, at this period, grew vast; but were indefinite. He often became disgusted with what he had done; and to fitful dreams of beauty in Art succeeded moods of despair; but he invariably returned to his models, imperfect as he perceived them to be, and resolved to labour on from the point of his present knowledge up to the mastery he coveted.
On the death of Toretto, in Canova’s fifteenth year, Falieri removed the aspiring boy to Venice. He was lodged in his patron’s palace; but was too truly a man, in spite of his youth, to brook entire dependence on another, and formed an engagement to work during the afternoons for a sculptor in the city. “I laboured for a mere pittance, but it was sufficient,” is the language of one of his letters. “It was the fruit of my own resolution; and, as I then flattered myself, the foretaste of more honourable rewards—for I never thought of wealth.” Under successive masters, Canova acquired a knowledge of what were then held to be the established rules of sculpture, but made no important essay, except his Eurydice, which was of the size of nature, and had “great merit” in the estimation of his patron, although Canova himself thought not so highly of it. Indeed, his genius was preparing to break away from the mannerism of his instructors almost as soon as it was learnt. The works of Bernini, Algardi, and other comparatively inferior artists, were then taken for models rather than the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus, or the Gladiator—the transcendent remains of ancient statuary. “The unaffected majesty of the antique,” observes Mr. Mernes, Canova’s English biographer, was then “regarded as destitute of force and impression.” And as for Nature, “her simplicity was then considered as poverty, devoid of elegance or grace.” Nature, therefore, was not imitated by this school of sculptors; but, in the critical language of one of their own countrymen, she was but “translated according to conventional modes.” Canova spurned subjection to the trammels of corrupt taste; and, after deep thought, his resolve was taken, and he entered on a new and arduous path. He thenceforth “took Nature as the text, and formed the commentary from his own elevated taste, fancy, and judgment.”
The exhibition of his Orpheus, the companion-statue to his Eurydice, in his twentieth year, gave commencement to Canova’s success and reputation, and proved the devotion with which he had applied himself to the study of the anatomy of life, to whatever he observed to be striking in the attitudes of living men, in the expression of their countenances, in “the sculpture of the heart.” (Il scolpir del cuore), as he so beautifully termed it. His style was foreign to prevailing false taste; but it was so true to Nature that its excellence won him general admiration.
Rome, the great capital of Art, naturally became the theatre of his ambition at this period; and, soon after his twenty-third birthday, he enters on his career in the Eternal City, under the patronage of the Venetian ambassador, obtained through Falieri’s friendship. With rapture he beheld a mass of marble, which had cost what would equal sixty-three pounds sterling, arrive at the ambassador’s palace, as an assurance that he would have the material for accomplishing a great work he had devised. Yet, with an overawed sense of the perfection he now saw in the remains of ancient sculpture, and believing himself deficient in the conception of ideal beauty, he studied deeply and worked in secret, shutting himself up in a room of the ambassador’s palace, after each daily visit to the grand galleries. His Theseus and Minotaur was, at length, shown; and he was considered to have placed himself at the head of living sculptors.
Ten successive years of his life, after this triumph, were devoted to funeral monuments of the Popes Clement the Fourteenth (Ganganelli), and Clement the Twelfth (Rezzonico). “They were,” says his biographer, “years of unceasing toil and solicitude, both as the affairs of the artist did not permit of having recourse to the assistance of inferior workmen, and as he meditated technical improvements and modes of execution unknown to contemporaries. Much valuable time was thus lost to all the nobler purposes of study, while the conducting from their rude and shapeless state to their final and exquisite forms such colossal masses was no less exhausting to the mind than to the body. The method, however, which was now first adopted, and subsequently perfected, not only allowed, in future, exclusive attention to the higher provinces of art, but enabled this master to produce a greater number of original works than any other of modern times can boast.” These observations show Canova to have been one of the noblest disciples of perseverance; slighting the readier triumphs he might have won, by exerting his skill with the customary appliances, he aimed to invent methods whereby gigantic works in art might be more readily achieved, both by himself and his successors: he prescribed for himself the work of a discoverer, and he magnanimously toiled till he succeeded.
Canova’s most perfect works were, of course, accomplished in his full manhood. These were his Cupid and Psyche, Venus, Perseus, Napoleon, Boxers, and Hercules and Lichas: creations which have made so truthfully applicable to his glorious genius the immortal line of Byron:
“Europe, the world, has but one Canova.”
Titles of honour were showered on him during his latter years; among the rest that of “Marquis of Ischia;” but he esteemed all of them as inferior to the triumph of his advocacy for the restoration of the precious works of ancient art to Italy. He was commissioned by the Pope for this undertaking, and his great name will be imperishably united with the memory of its success.