Canova: Four Tempos by ACC Art Books

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This second volume you are about to leaf through was begun a few years ago in conjunction with the Pallavicino Foundation’s inauguration in July 2019. Our family has always wanted to preserve and enhance our country’s artistic heritage, and this photographic project, divided into four sections, bears witness to the foundation’s eagerness to make that cultural heritage more widely available and the synergy that developed between the actors involved. The Pallavicino family can trace its lineage back to one of the most ancient feudal families in northern Italy, the Obertenghi, and it is thus no surprise that it should be an energetic sponsor of initiatives designed to boost the appreciation of art and culture in all their forms. The launch of a project that sees the Pallavicino Foundation collaborate with 5 Continents Editions in an international publishing venture is due to the efforts of Professor Vittorio Sgarbi, the foundation’s artistic director, whom I take this opportunity to thank. His contribution was essential in giving due impetus to an undertaking that we trust will enable the timeless beauty of these masterpieces to be known and appreciated throughout the world. Exploring the plaster casts displayed in the Possagno gallery is a joy; all the more so in the company of Luigi Spina’s wonderfully perceptive photographs that manage to capture the true essence of these works, enabling scholars and art lovers to become acquainted with the frequently neglected creative impulses behind the oeuvre of one of the greatest sculptors of all time: Antonio Canova. Thanks to Spina’s photographs, we can allow our attention to linger over the actual moment of the Veneto artist’s creation and take note, for example, of the crucial part played by the little iron nails (repères) that enabled the plaster model to metamorphose into the marble sculpture.

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C A N O VA L I V E S VITTORIO SGARBI

What does Luigi Spina see in Canova? What does he seek in him? He seeks the opposite of what Canova wants: imperfection. Other great photographers have grappled with Canova. In 1992 Mimmo Jodice took up the challenge: deploying the sharpness of the photographer’s eye before forms that are absolutes in their space, isolated from any element that might disturb them, Jodice enhances Canova’s perfection and goes beyond the ideal, conveying the immaterial dimension of pure thought. His aim is to “turn the sculptures into real live bodies through the medium of photography.” But that is not what happens, because those bodies are pure ideas, essence. Canova is sufficient unto himself. But Jodice wants to get to the bottom of “the invention of beauty,” to discover its origins. He doesn’t record, he hunts down a secret in order to reveal it, and his photographs have a life of their own, depending on how far they are from the sculptures. They seek another dimension, an inner space. The arm-wrestling Spina is engaged in is another matter. After photographing the “talking marbles” in the Farnese Collection in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, he takes on Canova’s world at the point most distant from the works’ ﬁnal destination. He makes his way to the sculptor’s studio, which has since become a great museum: the Possagno plaster cast gallery. Interestingly, after seeing these works for the ﬁrst time, he made a comment that revealed a sensibility unlike Jodice’s: “I had long thought that the best way to tackle Canova was to bypass the ‘boring marble,’ which had been photographed ad nauseam and misunderstood, and head for the plaster!” For Spina, plaster is the opposite of marble. It is a material associated with tactile imperfection, as opposed to its incorruptible counterpart, where the idea is all and there is no trace of the hand’s action. Familiarity with the demands of working in black and white, and the need to approach the material gradually through details are essential to an understanding of what he is seeking: “Respect for the material, revealing the sculpture’s chalky surface by means of photographic sequences in contact with the subject. Plaster, in the artist’s act of molding it, is the fragile and variable moment in which the body of the sculpture is sensed. The act of creation at its most delicate moment. When a certain balance has to be reached. Between the artist’s genius and the limits of the material. The bright, white, formless plaster. The insubstantiality of plaster is a metaphor for human existence. The artist tries to mold it, to alter it, to force a shape onto it. Once plaster has become sculpture, it is the true expression of the creative impulse. It is primordial, formless matter that shines in the din and exhilaration of creation.”

C A N O VA L I V E S VITTORIO SGARBI

There we have it: Spina seeks “Canova’s fragile and variable moment,” while marble is

The orthodox view of Canova, which now seems so well established and uncontrover-

absolute, perfect, a conduit of eternity. Plaster is fragile, its surface like the skin on a human

sial, passed through various not insigniﬁcant stages during the twentieth century. Carlo

body. And so, “the insubstantiality of plaster is a metaphor for human existence.”

Ludovico Ragghianti claimed to prefer the preparatory drawings and sketches to the

And so it is that Spina’s photographs throb, they breathe: not in triumph, but in uneas-

excessively polished marble statues, because one could detect the artist’s spontaneous

iness. This is what Spina is looking for. And this is what he shows.

creative impulse. In her still pivotal 1943 appraisal of Canova, Elena Bassi also had her

He approaches the plaster casts with a frisson, keen to draw out their present identity

doubts, saying that the sculptor “is almost a prisoner in a quagmire of artistic theories

rather than their promise of immortality.

and choked by the petulant earnestness of his contemporaries.” Cesare Brandi went

The classical is timeless—and this is especially true of Canova. But Spina asserts its

even further: “He was art’s ﬁrst and extremely conscientious bureaucrat [. . .]. His

contemporary nature, he pursues it, tracking it down. He seeks errors, the boundary of

sculpture is still the most noble, most conscientious, most authentic and illusionary of

the quotidian. Canova, whose subject was the nude par excellence, would have felt

surrogates.” Roberto Longhi’s opinion was incisive and brooked no rebuttal: “Antonio

naked before Spina’s photographs, almost to the point of no longer recognizing himself

Canova, the stillborn sculptor, whose heart is in the Frari, whose hand is in the

or not wanting to recognize himself.

Accademia and the rest of whom is who knows where.” Giulio Carlo Argan took a dif-

Spina seeks neither the whole, in its absoluteness, nor its constituents, in their alien-

ferent line, smoothing over his colleagues’ grumpiness and describing Canova as the

ation. He makes his way forward through broad, unusual, unpredictable details. He

most modern of the classicists.

sees what Canova himself did not see: Spina is not interested in recording; he wants to

Canova moves in an undeﬁned space that has no time boundaries: he is loaded with

feel the life that form encloses.

the future and carries a lot of baggage from the past. This has generated something

The Possagno plaster cast gallery doesn’t make life easy for Spina, unlike Canova’s

extraordinary that manages to halt time itself. In Paolina, the modern canons of beauty

studio in Rome, dimly lit and gloomy, as it must have been. The great Ala Lazzari hall,

turn into something ancient.

not to mention Carlo Scarpa’s annex, is a space that is always illuminated from outside,

In these plaster casts, Luigi Spina seeks a restless, divided artist, the master of a vision of

which is difficult for a photographer to handle. Problems with the lighting restrict the

timeless, unbounded beauty, an artist seeking harmony, perfect proportions and a lost

time available to a very short period, both in the day and in the time of year.

world. An artist attempting a reply to Keats’s questions in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Spina chose the ﬁrst ten days in January: “The serious problem, as I’ve often said, is that you can really only photograph Canova in the winter months, on account of the light. The

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

way Carlo Scarpa designed the space makes it impossible to screen the light properly.”

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

So Spina pursues the purely meteorological shade provided by the time of year when

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

the light is at its faintest. Maybe he could slip between the sculptures at the close of

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

day, in the pale light of sunset, when the plaster throbs and is at its most ﬂeshlike.

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What we see in his photographs is an idea converted into a form that is similar to marble, but vibrant like the wonderful terra-cottas in which one senses the very breath of life. In this way, photography assumes the role of the critic.