AS MASER is the finest statement of a domestic ideal of the sixteenth century, so Possagno, hardly fifteen kilometres across the hills to the north, is a locus classicus of Italian neoclassicism. It was here, in a valley below the southern flank of the Monte Grappa, some seventy-five kilometres north-east of Venice, that the last outstanding Venetian artist, Antonio Canova, was born in 1757. The greatest Italian sculptor of his time, Canova had an international celebrity. He dominated the artistic world of Rome for over a generation, and still deserves the gratitude of his country for the skill with which he superintended the return to the Italian states after 1815 of most of the works of art appropriated for the Louvre.
Canova’s house, near the centre of the small town, might be that of a successful merchant or lesser nobleman. But what distinguishes it is the gallery constructed to display the full-scale plaster models for many of the sculptor’s most celebrated marbles. The early Theseus, the uncompromising Madame Mère, the heroic Napoleon, the poignant Magdalen in Penitence and a constellation of others express the artistic and indeed the political preoccupations of Canova’s time. Together these models constitute a secular memorial to the sculptor. Nearby, in contrast, is a well-lit modern wing in which many smaller works, including Canova’s unexpectedly delicate models in terracotta, are most intelligently displayed. In the more modest rooms of the original house are his less successful efforts as a decorative painter. One leaves with some understanding of the range of the man.
Antonio Canova, the Tempio.
Above the town, with its back to the steep hillside, is the Tempio, a vast circular church with a commensurate portico of massive Doric columns, a building that seems to increase in scale as one walks up towards the platform on which it stands. The design was conceived by Canova himself. Work began in 1819, three years before his death, but was only completed in 1830. The church is an uncompromising masterpiece, inspired by both the Pantheon and – for the portico – the Parthenon. It is at once powerfully effective in its restatement of the neoclassical ideal, and yet convincing as a religious statement of a counterrevolutionary age when the Veneto was under Habsburg rule. The position of the Tempio reminds us that Canova was not only a idealist but also a visionary, with the Romantic’s understanding of the way so rigorously academic a structure would work in his clear native air, its meticulously cut stone in sharp contrast to the windswept trees that seem to tumble down the hill behind.