Antonio Canova · 1787–1793
Republic of Venice · 1757–1822
Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.
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Play CollectionPerseus
Antonio Canova · 1797
Vatican Museums
Venus Italica
Antonio Canova · 1804
Palazzo Pitti
The Venus Italica is a marble sculpture commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte and fashioned by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Canova finished the original work in 1802 and modelled two further variants which he completed in 1819. The work was to serve as a replacement for the Venus de Medici sculpture, a copy of an antique work by Cleomenes of Athens, which had been seized, taken to France and placed in the Louvre in 1802 by orders of Bonaparte.
Theseus and the Minotaur
Antonio Canova · 1781
Victoria and Albert Museum
Theseus and the Minotaur is a 1781 to 1782 white marble sculpture by Antonio Canova, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which bought it in 1962. The work was commissioned by Girolamo Zulian, Venetian ambassador to Rome and one of Canova's patrons, who also gave him the marble block for it; it is one of his earliest works after settling in Rome. Zulian left the choice of subject up to Canova, to whom Canova's friend Gavin Hamilton suggested Theseus just after killing the Minotaur from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Venus Victrix
Antonio Canova · 1800
Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix ("Venus Victorious") is a semi-nude and life-size reclining, neo-Classical portrait sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, who revived ancient Roman artistic traditions of portraying mortal individuals in the guise of deities, a beautiful woman reclining on a couch, or reclining hermaphroditi. The sculpture was commissioned by her husband Camillo Borghese and executed in Rome from 1805 to 1808, after the subject's marriage into the Borghese family. It then was moved to Camillo's house in Turin, then to Genoa, only arriving in its present location at the Galleria Borghese in Rome around 1838.
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