Today I expected to be on James Miller’s church sculpture treasure hunt in Northants. It is a perfect day to linger in cool church interiors and picnic on salmon rolls washed down with gin and wine. But I will not be cheated entirely and will conduct my own sculpture tour.
I have chosen Canova because, as far as I know, I wouldn’t have seen anything by him in Northamptonshire. Antonio Canova was born in Possagno, some forty miles NW of Venice, in 1757. In the spirit of the church sculpture tour we will look at three of his funerary monuments but first look at this.
It is the church in Possagno, the Tempio Canoviano, designed by Canova but not completed until after his death. It is, I believe, his only piece of extant architecture; well worth a day trip from Venice to see it and the Museo Canoviano. Our next stop is in St Peter’s Basilica where I saw his memorial to the Stuarts in 2017. It is described in this post, The Last of the Stuarts. Then back to Venice and the memorial Canova designed for Titian. It was never realised and became a memorial to Canova himself in the Frari.
To see our third Canova monument go to Vienna and take Richard Bassett as your guide. He arrived on a Saturday in 1985.
”The following day being Sunday, I was awoken by church bells. Outside the temperature was autumnal, the light strangely diffused by dust. Walking up to the end of the Spiegelgasse I soon found myself opposite the Augustinian Church. A door opened into an empty interior. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I found myself opposite the white marble pyramid which is Antonio Canova’s funerary masterpiece, the magnificent memorial to Archduchess Marie-Christine and one of the wonders of the new-classical age. The ephemeral quality of the winged Victory, the intense grief of the lion, the sombre cortège of the Virtues: I was mesmerized by the sheer scale and power of the composition.” (Last Days in Old Europe, Richard Bassett)
M-C, Mimi to her friends, mother was the only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions and the last ruler of the House of Habsburg. Richard Bassett is writing her biography. I hope you bought a ticket for my Canova tour?