HUGH HONOUR

A Bust of
Sappho by
Antonio Canova
The bust of
Sappho1
in the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Col-
lection, Princeton, N.J.
[Figs. 1-3], is one of several idealized
teste di donne ideali modelled and carved
by
Antonio Canova
(1757-1822) in the last decade of his life. As a series these have
rather
complex origins
in Canova's constant
struggle
to render
in
sculpted
human form an abstract
conception
of
beauty.
Sappho
is recorded in the
Catalogo cronologico
delle scul-
ture di Antonio Canova
pubblicato
dietro richiesta di S.A.R. il
Principe di Baviera: "Anno 1819 ... Busto di Saffo, posseduto
da
Lord Bethell."2 It is
similarly described, with variations in the
spelling
of Bethell's name, by Leopoldo Cicognara,3
Melchiorre
Missirini,4 and Antonio d'Este.5 Another
description
was
pub-
lished, with an
engraving
of the
profile
of the head, by
Isabella
Teotochi Albrizzi in 1824.6 A cast from the marble is in the
Gip-
soteca di
Possagno.7
These authors
incorrectly
raised the owner of the bust to the
title of "lord." He was in fact William John
Codrington,
born 1768
as the second son of Edward
Codrington.
His
younger brother,
Sir Edward
Codrington,
was to command the British fleet at the
Battle of Navarino. In 1798, William assumed
by royal
license the
maiden name of his
paternal grandmother,
Elizabeth
Bethell,
wife of Sir William
Codrington
bt.
On 21
April 1819, Bethell, writing
Canova from the Hotel Gran
Bretagna
in
Rome, arranged
to
pay
the
sculptor
one hundred
luigi.8
Such was the sum which Canova
charged
for busts at this
time.9 After
returning
to
England
later that
year,
Bethell wrote
from his home at
Merly House, Dorset, to tell Canova that a small
room had been
prepared
for "our
Sappho,"
where she would not
be disturbed
by
the
volgo,
or common
people,
but could be ad-
mired
by persons
of taste. 10 These letters
imply
that the bust was
already
finished when Bethell first saw it in Rome in the
spring
of 1819. The
significance
of the date on the back -1817 -is un-
certain. It
probably
refers to the
clay model, and if so, it is
unlikely
that the marble was finished
by then, or had even been started
yet
for that matter. There was
always
a
lag,
sometimes of a
year
or
more, between Canova's
completion
of a
clay
model and when
he
began
work on the marble. 11 In
February
and
again
in
August
1817, Canova mentioned in letters to his friend and future bi-
ographer Leopoldo Cicognara
that he was
working
on "some ideal
busts," which
may
have included
Sappho.12
In his
quest
for the ideal, the bust, that most self-conscious-
ly
artificial of all
European
artistic
conventions, became Cano-
va's chosen vehicle, even
though-or perhaps
because-
ancient Roman busts were
usually portraits.
193
HUGH HONOUR
1) Antonio Canova, <(Sappho)),
front view, Barbara Piasecka 2) Antonio Canova, <(Sappho)),
back view, Barbara Piasecka
Johnson Collection, Princeton, N.J. Johnson Collection, Princeton, N.J.
Unlike earlier
eighteenth-century
French and Italian
sculp-
tors and, indeed, such
younger contemporaries
as Bertel Thor-
valdsen and Lorenzo Bartolini, Canova was
always
averse to
carving portraits.
He would nevertheless be
obliged
to do one of
Napoleon
in
1802, followed
immediately by portraits
of
Pope
Pius VII and the Austrian
emperor
Franz I (as if to demonstrate
political neutrality!).
Various members of the
all-powerful
Bonaparte family
then clamored to have their
portraits
done
by
him, and in the circumstances he was bound to
comply,
but he
did so
very reluctantly.
Portraits, he is said to have remarked, were admired
only
when
recognized
as
good
likenesses- "as if that were the
great
merit of
painting
and
sculpture!"13
His statues of the
living,
divested of
contemporary costume, were conceived as works of
art
embodying
eternal
principles,
with concessions to individual
characterization made
only
in their facial features. Portrait busts
could
hardly
be "elevated" in this
way.
But those he
perforce
un-
dertook
may
well have
prompted
him to
explore
the
possibilities
of the bust as an art form divorced from
portraiture.
Canova also
objected
to
working
on less than life-size scale.
(His only
smaller statues date from
very early
in his career.) There
was, however, a
steady market, which he could not afford to
ig-
nore, for
relatively small, easily
housed
sculptures:
busts of
gods
and
goddesses, allegorical personifications
of the seasons, and
so on.
According
to Missirini, Canova's ideal busts were execut-
ed either "for his own
pleasure,
or to
satisfy
the demands of
those who could not afford
larger works, or as
gifts
for his
friends."14
194
A BUST OF SAPPHO
The first of Canova's marble busts were derived from his
own
full-length life-size, or
larger,
statues: that of
Temperance
on the monument to Clement XIV, and one of several versions
of an amorino.15 He carved busts based on his Paris for both
the French ambassador in Rome, Charles-Jean
Alquier,
in
1806-08, and Quatremere de
Quincy
in 1809. The latter was
an old friend who had
recently praised
Canova's work in the
French
press.16
In 1811 Canova chose
subjects
he had not
previously
represented
for two busts he
presented
to admirers. Helen was
a suitable
gift
for the Greek-born Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi
(despite
the fact that her own features were
anything
but clas-
sical), in
gratitude
for her
recently published
book on his work.
The Muse was for the Countess of
Albany,
who had been the
Egeria
of Vittorio Alfieri, in whose
memory
she commissioned
Canova to carve a
large
monument for the church of Santa
Croce in Florence.17 These two busts were followed
by
two
more of Muses, made for Count Antonio Pezzoli of
Bergamo
and Giovanni Rosini, professor
of rhetoric at the
University
of
Pisa and
principal
contributor to a volume
celebrating
the in-
stallation of Canova's Venere Italica in the Uffizi
Gallery
in Flor-
ence.18 In 1818 he sent four teste di donne ideali to the Duke
of
Wellington,
Viscount
Castlereagh,
William Richard Hamil-
ton, and Charles
Long,
to make
up
for the
pope's inadequate
acknowledgement
of their
help
in
securing
the return to the
Papal
States of works of art removed
by
the French.19
At about the same time he also
began
to create busts des-
tined for sale.
Although
he had
probably
made more
money
than
any
other artist of his time, he needed to finance the build-
ing
of a new
parish
church for his native
village
of
Possagno.
And he found that he could carve busts even
during
the hot
summer months in Rome when, as his health deteriorated, he
was no
longer
able to work on
large
statues.20
Canova used the same
procedures
in his busts that he had
developed
in the 1780s for
large-scale
works. As small bozzetti
were
hardly needed, however, he
began
with full-size
clay
models from which
plaster
casts were made. These were
marked with
points
to enable his assistants to
rough
out blocks
of marble on which he could then work, chiselling
and
filing
with that technical
accomplishment
and artistic
sensitivity
to
the material so
greatly appreciated by
his admirers and sur-
passed by
no other
sculptor.
Blocks of
appropriate
dimensions
for his statues and
groups
were ordered from the marble mer-
chants of Carrara. Antonio d'Este, who
supervised
the studio,
usually
went there to select them.
During
the
roughing-out
process,
some
fairly large pieces
were often removed and care-
fully put
aside for later use in other works. The
exceptionally
fine block selected for Canova's heroic-scale
Napoleon
is said
to have
yielded
the marble for his second
Magdalen (from the
pyramid
between the
legs),
and also for his bust of Pius VII
(from beneath the
right arm)-and this cannot be discounted
as
myth.21
When other blocks were
roughed
out
they
were found to
be so
strongly disfigured
with black veins in
places
that
they
could not be used for their intended
purpose, although
much
of the material was unflawed. Two
designated
for the statue of
Princess
Leopoldina Esterhazy
had to be abandoned before
Canova could
begin
work on a third with less
prominent
blem-
ishes. He therefore must have accumulated a
quantity
of
pieces
of
good
marble too small for life-size statues. It seems
likely
that at least some of his ideal busts were carved from
such "leftover" material; and it is
perhaps significant
that he
gave away
several of them. If this is so, the form of the available
material
may
have conditioned the
general
outline of the bust
he could carve from it, almost in the
way
that
Michelangelo
had
sought
to liberate his
figures
from the solid block.
Without commissions from
patrons
or even the need to
keep
in mind the
likely
demands of
potential purchasers,
Cano-
va was
completely
free to
express
his "aesthetic" in these
busts. Unlike
portrait
busts
they
were intended to be seen from
every possible viewpoint-almost,
one
might say,
to be visual-
ly
caressed. And this
intimacy
of touch can be felt
throughout,
every
detail
contributing
to the
closely integrated
effect of the
whole. The treatment of the
hair, for
example,
and the ribbons
and nets that bind it, presents
a seamless
garment
of inter-
woven curves
revolving through
a series of mellifluous and
ap-
parently
effortless transitions. It can be
appreciated simply
as
an
exquisitely elaborated,
subtly
textured three-dimensional
form, like a Chinese
jar
that "still moves
perpetually
in its still-
ness"-a kind of Kantian
Ding
an sich. But this is to
ignore
what was
surely
for Canova
equally
if not more
important:
the
realization of an ideal of human
beauty,
neither naturalistic nor
in
any way
unnatural.
Byron
understood this when he wrote of
the bust of Helen:
In this beloved marble view
Above the works &
thoughts
of Man
-
What Nature could-but would not do
-
And
Beauty
and Canova can!
It
was, Byron wrote, "the most
perfectly
beautiful of human
conceptions-and
far
beyond my
ideas of human execu-
tion."22 It cannot have been without some
thought
that Cano-
va chose to initiate his series of ideal busts with one of Helen.
He doubtless had in mind Cicero's account of how Zeuxis
depicted
her
by selecting
the best features from five models
-
literally
the locus classicus for this
type
of idealization. In his
later busts Canova
similarly sought
to extract from common
195
HUGH HONOUR
nature what natura naturans had intended but natura naturata
had failed to
perform.
His statues were of course
similarly
ideal-
ized, and he seems to have welcomed the
necessity
to transform
one
originally
carved as a
portrait
of
Napoleon's
sister Elisa
Baciocchi into the muse
Polyhymnia
as an
opportunity
to
purge
the
physiognomy
of individual characteristics, or "accidents of
nature" in the
terminology
of the time.23
Thus the busts share a
very strong family
resemblance in fa-
cial features, and at first
sight might
seem to differ from one
another
only
in their coiffure. There are, however, subtle varia-
tions-in the fullness of cheeks, for example, or the
height
of the
brow,
or the
relationship
of nose to mouth and chin.
Expressions
also
vary, though
none has the strained
emphasis
of the t6tes
d'expression painted
and modelled
by
French artists. All are
calmly contemplative.
The names
given
to them sometimes raise
problems.
Cano-
va sent a bust with no name to W. R.
Hamilton, who referred to
it as "the
very
beautiful bust of
Sappho,
or
by
whatever other
name I should call it."24 Yet there can be no doubt that these
busts were conceived not
only
as ideal heads of women but also
as heads of ideal women (teste di donne ideali can mean either
or both). With the
exception
of those of the Muses, none
depicts
a
deity: they
are all mortals, including
vestal
virgins,
Dante's Bea-
trice, Petrarch's
Laura,
and the
poets
Corinna and
Sappho.
Nor
is
any
more
clearly
identified than is the
Sappho
in the Barbara
Piasecka Johnson Collection.
Sappho's poetry
and
personality
had fascinated the classi-
cally
educated ever since the Renaissance. In Canova's time
and for
many years
afterwards
only
two of her
poems,
written
about 600 B.C., were known,
in both cases from
quotations
in
treatises on
literary theory,
which held them
up
as models. A
fragment
was cited
by Longinus
in his treatise on The Sublime,
and a
complete
Ode to
Aphrodite
was
quoted by Dionysius
of
Halicarnassus in his discourse on
literary composition.
Both
were translated into Latin (the former
by Catullus), as well as
Italian and other modern
European languages.
And the
gently
lilting Sapphic
meter in which
they
were written was often
adopted by poets
from the sixteenth
century
onwards.
There were also
many
allusions to
Sappho
in classical liter-
ature, forming
the basis for somewhat
conflicting
accounts of
her life. While her fondness for the
girls
of her native island of
Lesbos was mentioned, far more
prominence
was
given
to the
legend
of her
unrequited
love for a handsome
young
man
named Phaon, for whom she committed suicide
by throwing
herself from the Leucadian cliff on the Lesbian coast. A
long
"Epistle
from
Sappho
to Phaon"
by
Ovid in his
Heroides, led to
the
widespread
diffusion of this
story.
In the late
eighteenth
and
early
nineteenth centuries, the
unique
combination of a
woman's
poetic genius, physical desire, and suicide made a
particularly strong appeal
to sensitive souls. Hence
Byron
in
Childe Harold (1812):
But when he saw the
evening
star above
Leucadia's
far-projecting
rock of woe,
And hail'd the last resort of fruitless love,
He felt, or deem'd he felt, no common
glow....
Later he referred to
"burning Sappho"
at the
beginning
of his
invocation to the Isles of Greece. It was
surely Sappho
as the
hapless
lover of Phaon whom
Byron
had in mind, and Canova
too when he carved his bust of her. In
fact,
it was not until the
late nineteenth
century
that
Sappho
came to be associated
mainly
with female
homosexuality,
and even then this
interpre-
tation met with
protests
from classical scholars.
By
that date
many
more
fragments
of her
poetry
had been discovered, none
of which was
explicitly "Sapphic"
as the term was
by
then un-
derstood.
There were, of
course,
no likenesses of
Sappho dating
from
her own time. Nor is there
any
reference to later
images
of her in
classical sources
apart
from Cicero's remark that a statue of her
by
the
sculptor
Silanon of Athens in the late fourth
century
B.C.
was "so
perfect,
so elaborate, so
elegant,"
that it should not have
fallen into the hands of Verres. In the
eighteenth century,
however,
it was believed that she was
represented by
the heads
(now identified as
Apollo)
on coins with
lyres
on their reverses,
which were struck at
Mytilene
in the Hellenistic
period.
Sappho's name was inscribed on a few
antique gems
and on
life-size busts of a woman with rather severe features and usual-
ly having
her hair
gathered
at the back of her head in a kind of
net or scarf.
Many
others of the same
iconographic type
were
said to
portray
her. The best-known busts were those in the
Palazzo Giustiniani and Villa Albani in Rome.25 Others were sold
to
English
and German
grand
tourists.
By
the
early
nineteenth
century
there were no fewer than a dozen
supposed Sapphos
in
English
collections. Of one
acquired by
Sir Richard
Worsley,
the
eminent connoisseur of ancient
sculpture,
Ennio Quirino Viscon-
ti, wrote in 1796:
It cannot be doubted that this is an
image
of the famous
Sap-
pho, represented
in the same
way
in several marbles found
with her name. There is a certain
virility
in her face that cor-
responds
well with the
epithet
mascula
given
her
by Horace,
though
that
may
also allude to her notorious
partiality
for the
virgins
of her native Lesbos....26
Less than a
century later, however, Adolf Michaelis was to refute
that assessment: "the
appellation
is
arbitrary;
the work
insignifi-
cant; the
genuineness
of the whole ...
open
to doubt."27
Many
196
A BUST OF SAPPHO
3) Antonio Canova, ((Sappho)),
Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection, Princeton, N.J.
197
a..
kh~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*,~~~~~~~~~~~~,
4_~~-
HUGH HONOUR
other
images
that had been treasured
mainly
as
portrayals
of
Sappho
were
similarly
dismissed and described as female
por-
traits of uncertain date.
Sappho
is included in
Raphael's
Parnassus fresco, identi-
fied
by
the name on the scroll she holds aloft. But when artists
began
to
depict
her in the second half of the
eighteenth
centu-
ry, they
turned to the
antique
busts and
gems
that
gave
a face
to the name.
Angelica
Kauffmann was
among
the first to be at-
tracted to the
subject, perhaps
because of her own
unhappy
love life. In 1775 she exhibited at the
Royal Academy
in London
a
painting
of
Sappho gazing
at Eros and
holding
a tablet in-
scribed in Greek with lines from her Ode to
Aphrodite:
"So
come
again
and deliver me / from intolerable
pain."28
Three
years
later the brothers
Georg Sigmund
and Johann Gottlieb
Facius executed a
stipple engraving
of the
expanded
version of
Kauffmann's
composition, published by
John
Boydell
under
the title
Sappho inspired by
Love
composes
an Ode to Venus.
(It may
be more than a coincidence that also in 1778 the
Reverend William Mason-Horace
Walpole's
friend-wrote
the libretto for an
opera
called
Sappho.) By
this date heads of
Sappho
were
being engraved
on
gems
that could be used as
seals. Nathaniel Marchant,
the
leading English
master of the
glyptic art,
carved one in Rome
probably
in 1782-83 and
described it in his own
catalogue
as "from the head about the
size of life and of Greek
simplicity,
in the Giustiniani Palace,"
that is to
say
the bust now in the Vatican Museums.29 Also in
Rome, the Irish
painter Henry
Tresham
published
in 1784 a col-
lection of
eighteen aquatints inspired by
Alessandro Verri's Le
Avventure diSaffo of 1781. The
young
Canova knew Marchant
and was
closely
associated with both Verri and Tresham,
whose
prints
he must
surely
have seen.
In the troubled last decade of the
century, Sappho's
death
began
to attract the attention of French artists. The theme was
depicted by Jean-Joseph
Taillasson in 1791, Jacques
Taurel in
1794, and Antoine-Jean Gros in 1801.30 In a statuette
by
Claude
Ramey
exhibited at the Salon of 1800, Sappho
seems
to be
contemplating
suicide after
writing
her Ode to
Aphro-
dite.31 In
Bologna
in 1808, artists
entering
the Concorso
Curlandese were
required
to
paint
a
landscape
with the death
of
Sappho.32
But the
story
of her life also
provided
some less
tragic
themes. The Danish
painter
Nicolai Abraham
Abildgaard,
al-
ways original
in his choice of
subjects,
showed her in 1809 em-
bracing
a sinuous naked
"girl
of
Mytilene"
-a rare if not
unique
allusion in the art of this
period
to her
alleged
homosexuali-
ty.33
But she is
flirting
with a
conspicuously
indifferent Phaon
in
Jacques-Louis
David's
Sapho,
Phaon etl'Amourof the same
year,
commissioned
by
Prince Nikolai Borisovich
Jusupov (or
Youssoupoff),
the Russian ambassador to Paris.
Jusupov
was
also a
patron
of Canova, who
may
well have seen this
painting
in Paris in 1810 and was to be
given
a
very
unfavorable account
of it
by
a
correspondent
in Russia the
following year.34
"Sappho
was not
always unhappy,"
wrote Isabella Teotochi
Albrizzi,
who
praised
Canova's bust for
conveying
"the first
smile of love on her
lips."35 Although Sappho
has the
chastely
gathered
and bound coiffure of the
antique
busts which were
thought
to
represent
the
poet,
the facial features are delicate,
with no hint of the mannish. The
severity
of the form is alleviat-
ed
by
the
gentleness
of the
expression
which charmed Cano-
va's
contemporaries.
Giustina Renier Michiel, a
leading
Veneti-
an
bluestocking
to whom Canova had
given
a cast of his herm
of
Sappho (similar to the bust
except
for the base and hair),
remarked in her letter of thanks:
"Sappho
sees Phaon from
afar, her heart beats faster, her breath
quickens; joy spreads
all
over her
angelic countenance, and that most seductive mouth
already speaks
his name."36 One of her friends,
Francesco
Negri,
was
prompted
to
compose
an
epigram:
Ape
di Pindo,
onor de' Lesbi lidi,
Dimmi: a Faone,
o al tuo scultor sorridi?37
(Bee of Mount Pindus, pride
of the Lesbian isle,
Is it on Phaon or
your sculptor
that
you smile?)
Neither a
simper
nor a
grin,
it is a
genuine
smile with
perhaps
a touch of
shyness
and also, perhaps,
of sadness.
Canova had
probably
read as much of
Sappho's poetry
as
was available in translation, and
may
even have had in mind
some of the lines
quoted by Longinus
as a model for the selec-
tion and combination of associated elements to "form, as it
were, a
single body":
Blest as the immortal
gods
is he
The
youth
whose
eyes may
look on thee,
Whose ears
thy tongue's
sweet
melody
May
still devour.
Thou smilest too!-sweet smile whose charm
Has struck
my
soul with wild alarm,
And, when I see thee,
bids disarm
Each vital
power.
This free version
by
J. Herman Merivale, published
in 1833, indi-
cates better than a more accurate and literal translation how the
poem
was read in the
early
nineteenth
century.
Canova's bust is
an evocation of
Sappho
no less redolent of his
epoch,
an
example
of what Stendhal called the "beau ideal moderne" and
markedly
different from
any
of the
antique
busts
supposedly representing
her. It is one of the most restrained of the
sculptor's
teste di
198
A BUST OF SAPPHO
donne ideali, without the
free-falling ringlets
and
flying
ribbons
that seem almost to tremble on several of the others. In the
whole series it has the effect of a slow movement in a suite for
piano.
Canova's
supreme
technical
ability
is
reticently
but
nonetheless
clearly expressed
in the subtlest variations of tex-
ture. The bust is animated not
only by
the
enigmatic
smile but
also
by
the deviations from
lifelessly
strict
symmetry
in the ren-
dering
of the few errant locks that
escape
from the
gathering
of
the
smoothly
combed hair. For Canova's ideal of
beauty
was
by
no means
purely
cerebral and abstract. As
Cicognara,
the most
sensitive of his
many contemporary
admirers remarked:
1
Marble, 53.3 cm.
high.
Inscribed on the underside atthe front:
EAnI-Q; and on the back: SAPPHO/A. CANOVA / 1817. Provenance:
Acquired
from the
sculptor by
William John Bethell; by
descent to Sir
Geoffrey Codrington bt., after whose death it was sold
by
the trustees
of his estate at Roche Court, Winterslow, Wiltshire; auctioneers Hum-
berts
King
and Chasemore, 23-25 October 1978, lot 1264.
2
Rome, 1819, p.
21. The
Catalogo cronologico
was first
printed
in 1817 and
reprinted,
with an additional four
pages,
in 1819. As stated
on
p.
18: "Tutte
queste
notizie vennero communicate dal chiarissimo
Scultore, col fine d'identificare le
precise
sue
opere,
ed escludere
quelle
che
per
avventura
gli
venissero falsamente attribuite, togliendo
cosi di mezzo
ogni equivoco."
The full
catalogue
text is
reprinted
for
the first time in Edizione nazionale delle
opere
diAntonio Canova, I, ed.
H. Honour, Rome, 1992.
3
See L.
Cicognara, Biografia
diAntonio Canova, Venice, 1823,
p.
68.
4
See M. Missirini, Della vita di Antonio Canova, Prato, 1824,
p.
511.
5
See A. d'Este, Memorie di Antonio Canova, Florence, 1864,
p.
343.
6 See I. Teotichi Albrizzi, Opere
di scultura e
diplastica
diAntonio
Canova, IV, Pisa, 1824, pp. 3-4, pl.
cxii. The
print
was
copied
in The
Works of Antonio Canova in
Sculpture
and
Modelling Engraved
in Out-
line
by Henry Moses, London, 1824
(reprinted 1887), pl.
Ixxxviii.
he seems to have
proceeded by
first
expressing
all the divini-
ty
of the ideal in his
figures
and then
recalling them,
one
might say,
to
humanity, scattering
here and there little traces
of naturalism that he
attentively
noted in
reality
and which
with consummate
mastery
he
impressed
on his works so
that
they
ceased to be stone and
acquired
an
extraordinary
softness from his final touches.38
None of his busts reveals this better than
Sappho,
which chrono-
logically
and
thematically
holds a central
position
in the whole
series.
7
See E. Bassi, La
Gipsoteca diPossagno, Venice, 1957, no. 272.
8
Biblioteca Civica, Bassano del
Grappa,
MSS Canoviani 1297:
"Signore
Bethell
presenta
i suoi
complimenti
al Marchese Canova e se
le sia medesima cosa, invece di darle un
biglietto
su i
Signori
Chiavari
[sic] chi caricherebbero commissioni sara
obligata
al Marchese di tirare
al suo
piacere
su i suoi
banquieri
'i
Signori Stephenson
& Co. No. 69 Lom-
bard St. Londra' sul conto del
Signore
Bethell che
gli
dar3 le sue instruzio-
ni di onorare il
biglietto
del Marchese
per
Cento
Luigi.
Come la sua
figlia
e ancora in letto, prega
il Marchese di scusare la sua cattiva italiana e di
accettare i suoi
migliori
desideri
per
la salute e la felicit3 del Marchese.
Gran
Brettagna. Aprile
21. 1819." The Chiaveri were bankers
closely
as-
sociated with the more famous Torlonia
family.
Bethell's
daughter
was
his
only child, Emma, who died unmarried in 1874. The Hotel Gran Breta-
gna
was
evidently
favored
by
the British: Thomas Lawrence
stayed
there
briefly
in
May
1819.
9
In 1819, Paolo Tosio
paid
200 zecchini for a bust of Eleonora
d'Este (Pinacoteca Tosio
Martinengo, Brescia); see M. Mondini, C. Zani,
Paolo Tosio, Brescia, 1981, p.
82. In 1820, Marchese Tancredi di Barolo
paid
100
luigi
for a herm of
Sappho (Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Turin); see
G. Pavanello, L'Opera completa
del Canova, Milan, 1976, no. 334.
10
Bassano del
Grappa,
Biblioteca Civica, MSS Canoviani 2175:
"Mio Caro Marchese, Siamo stati arrivati in
Inghilterra
ci sono
piu
di tre
mese e
speriamo
che non sara
sorpresa
se cominciamo ad essere
sellecitosi d'intendere
qualche
cosa della nostra
Sapho. Spero
che ha
199
HUGH HONOUR
preso
la sua ricordanza e che il Marchese, di cui lo
scalpello magico puo
creare le Dee 3
piacere,
6 reconciliato alla
seperazione
della
Sapho.
Uno
bello Gabinetto e destinato
per
la sua residenza dov' ella
puo esprimer
la sua
imaginazione
non turbata dalla intrusione del
volgo,
ma dov' ella
riceve
sempre
i mortali del buon
gusto per
che la facciano le loro adorazi-
one. Come il Marchese sa che il mio Italiano non b
copioso, spero
che mi
scusera di
aggiungere
che i
migliori
desideri della
Signora
Bethell e di del-
la mia
figlia
uniti ai miei
per
la sanitb e
per
la felicita del Marchese e del
suo fratello ii buon Abbato e che
speriamo
di vederli in
Inghilterra
la
primavera prossima.
Resto
sempre,
Mio Caro Marchese, Verissimamente
il suo W. J. Bethell.
Merly
House." The letter is
postmarked
1819.
11
It seems
unlikely
that the bust of
Sappho
had been finished in
1817 and left unsold in his studio for two
years
at a time when his work
was in
great
demand and he was so hard
pressed
to fulfill commissions
that he was
refusing
to
accept any
more. But the
inscription may
well
have been added after the bust left his studio, as the Latin and
English
spelling
of
Sappho-rather
than the Italian
Saffo-suggests. Although
Canova's name is sometimes
boldly
inscribed on his works, and also
many
others for which he had no
responsibility (such as
copies
of
Chaudet's bust of
Napoleon),
he seems
only rarely
to have
signed
and
dated his marbles. The most notable
exceptions
are the busts he made
for
presentation
to friends and others, including
Quatremere de
Quincy,
the Duke of
Wellington,
and Viscount
Castlereagh,
which all have
dedicatory inscriptions.
The
lettering, however, is
markedly
different
from that on the back of
Sappho.
12 See V. Malamani, Un' amicizia di Antonio Canova, Citta di
Castello, 1890, pp. 84, 121.
13
D'Este, Memorie diAntonio Canova, p.
145.
14
Missirini, Della Vita diAntonio Canova, p.
221.
15
The head of
Temperance
was
roughed
out in the summer of
1787
immediately
after the installation of the monument but never com-
pleted,
and is now in the
Gipsoteca
di
Possagno;
see Bassi, La
Gipsoteca,
no. 16. The head of an amorino was carved for Prince Adam
Auersperg
in 1792 (now lost).
16 The
present
whereabouts of the head
given
to
Alquier
is un-
recorded. The
gift
to Quatrembre de
Quincy
is in the Art Institute of
Chicago;
see I.
Wardroper,
T. F. Rowlands, "Antonio Canova and Quatre-
mere de
Quincy,"
The Art Institute of
Chicago
Museum Studies XV, no.
1 (1989), pp.
21-38.
17
Helen has
passed by
descent to Count Alessandro Albrizzi,
Venice, and the Muse is in the Musee Fabre, Montpellier;
see Pavanello,
L'Opera completa
del Canova, nos. 235, 239.
18
The bust for Pezzoli has not been traced. That for Rosini is in the
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence; see Pavanello, no. 237.
19 The bust
given
to the Duke of
Wellington
is in the
Wellington
Museum, London; that
given
to Lord
Castlereagh
is in the
possession
of the
Marquess
of
Londonderry;
that
given
to Hamilton is in the
pos-
session of his descendants; and that
given
to
Long
is in the Kimbell Art
Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. In a letter of 12
January 1817, Canova
wrote to
Luigi Angeloni:
"... di mio solo volontb mander6 al duca di Wel-
lington
a cui il Governo non ha
pensato
di mandare alcun
regalo,
un
busto ideale marmorio, un secondo al
signor
visconte
Castlereagh
e un
terzo al
signor
Hamilton" (A. Campani, "Sull'opera
di A. Canova nel
recupero
di monumenti d'arte italiani a
Parigi,"
Archivio Storico del-
l'Arte V [1892], p. 193).
20 In a letter of 8
February
1817 to
Cicognara,
Canova remarked
that he had been
working
on his statue of
Polyhymnia
but was un-
decided whether to
begin
on the marble
Nymph
or his
very large group
of Theseus and the Centaur: "credo a
quella ragazza, perche
la
stagione
invernale che avanza non mi basta a tanto lavoro; ed io
deggio
occuparmi
in esso nell'inverno o nell'autumno, quando
la
traspirazi-
one e meno facile e meno
pericolosa" (Malamani, Un'amicizia diAnto-
nio Canova, p. 84).
21
See Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome [1829], Paris, 1931,
III, 208.
22
Byron's
Letters and Journals, V, ed. L. A. Marchand, London,
1976, p.
133.
23 For the statue (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), see
Pavanello, L'Opera completa
del Canova, no. 268.
24
Biblioteca Civica, Bassano del
Grappa,
MSS Canoviani 1529.
25
For these busts see W.
Helbig,
FOhrer durch die 6ffentlichen
Sammlungen
klassischer AltertOmer in Rom [1912-13], Tubingen,
1963-72,1, p. 458, no. 588; IV, p. 288, no. 3251. Another well-known
bust of the same
type
is in the Louvre; see M. de Clarac, A.
Maury,
Musee de
sculpture antique
et moderne, Paris, 1841 -53, VI, p. 201,
no. 3520A, where, however, it is described as "femme inconnue."
Gems believed to
portray Sappho
were illustrated in the
catalogues
to
several collections, notably
those of the Uffizi
Gallery, Florence, and
the Duke of
Marlborough;
see S. Reinach,
Pierresgrav6es, Paris, 1895,
pp. 27, 82, 106, 117.
26
Ennio Quirino Visconti, Museo
Worslejano [1796], Milan,
1834, p.
50.
27 A. Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Cambridge,
1882, p.
228.
28
. F.
Tomory, "Angelica Kauffmann-Sappho,"
The
Burlington
Magazine
CXIII (1971), pp.
274-76. The
painting
is in the John and
Mable
Ringling
Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla.
29
G. Seidmann, "Nathaniel Marchant, Gem-Engraver,
1739-1816," Walpole Society Llll (1987), p.
66. As Seidmann notes,
Marchant had exhibited the wax model of a head of
Sappho
in London
in 1769, and was to exhibit a
gem
of the same
subject
at the
Royal
Academy
in London in 1797.
30
The
painting by
Taillasson is now in the Musee de Brest; see
Renaissance du Mus6e de Brest, exhib. cat., Mus6e du Louvre, Paris,
1974-75, no. 44. The
painting by
Gros is in the Musee Baron-Gerard,
Bayeux;
see De David a Delacroix, exhib. cat., Grand Palais, Paris,
1974-75, no. 87.
31 The
plaster
model for the statuette was described and illus-
trated
by
C. P Landon, Annales du Musee, I, Paris, 1800, p.
123. The
marble version exhibited in the Salon of 1801 is in the Louvre.
32
The
prize
was awarded to Giovanni Barbieri; see I Concorsi
Curlandesi, ed. E. Grandi, exhib. cat., Galleria Comunale di Arte
Moderna, Bologna, 1980, no. 5.
33
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
34
State
Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg;
see De David a
Delacroix, no. 36.
35
Opere
... diAntonio Canova, IV, 3.
36
Biblioteca Civica, Bassano del
Grappa,
MSS Canoviani 1629.
The cast is now in the Museo Correr, Venice; see Venezia dell' eta di
Canova, exhib. cat., Museo Correr, Venice, 1978, no. 142. The marble
from which it was taken is in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Turin; see
Pavanello, L'Opera completa
del Canova, no. 334. A bust
copied
from
this herm and
signed
Dimocrito Gandolfi
Bologna,
was exhibited at
Gallerie Carroll, Munich, in 1978-79.
Copies
of Canova's
Sappho-
though
whether of the bust or herm is not recorded-were exhibited
by
Giovanni Cocchi and Gaetano Motelli at the Accademia de Belle
Arti, Milan, in 1834.
37
E. Bassi, L. Urban Padoan, Canova e
gliAlbrizzi, Milan, 1989,
p.
122.
38
Cicognara, Biografia
diAntonio Canova, p.
51.
200