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.