IN BECOMING GAUDY AND UNINSPIRED, NAPOLEONIC ART had betrayed the ideals of neoclassicism which had been upheld and developed by the greatest sculptor of the Napoleonic era, the Venetian Antonio Canova. Like Titian and Palladio before him, Canova was a native of the terraferma who through his own talent and personal qualities made himself into a European celebrity. He knew of the horses from his youth, was confident enough to complain personally to Napoleon about their removal and was largely responsible for masterminding their return in 1815 to his native Venice. It is perhaps fitting that his funeral service in 1822 was held in St Mark’s and so his body was carried out under the loggia on which, thanks to his own efforts, the horses once again stood in glory.
Canova was born in 1757 in the small village of Possagno, in the hills near Treviso. His father died when he was only three, his mother remarried and moved, in effect abandoning him, and it was his grandfather who took care of him and apprenticed him to a family of sculptors. Canova resembles Palladio in that his talent was recognized by a local aristocrat, in his case Giovanni Falier, who gained him his early commissions. One of his very first, for Falier himself, of an Orpheus, was exhibited in the Piazza San Marco on the feast of the Ascension in 1777; so by the time he was twenty Canova already knew the horses of St Mark’s. His initiation into the sculpture of the ancient world was furthered by a famous collection of plaster casts of antique statues in the Palazzo Farsetti, from which he used to copy. Always ambitious, in 1779 he left Venice for Rome, where he came under the protection of the Venetian ambassador to the pope. In the highly competitive atmosphere of the Roman art world, personality and determination were as important as natural talent, and although Canova was a quiet and often withdrawn man, there was a confidence about him which enabled him to gain the immediate respect of those with whom he worked, even emperors. (Again one is reminded of Titian and Palladio.) He was particularly inspired by the classical past, especially its mythology, and he assembled his own library of classics and read deeply in archaeology and the lives of ancient heroes. He transformed the way he dressed, mastered ‘correct’ Italian and even learned some English and French. While Rome, and a connection to the papacy, were central to his life, he never forgot that he was first and foremost a Venetian. ‘I have St Mark in my heart and nothing in the world will change me,’ he said when he heard the news of the fall of the republic to Napoleon in 1797. The word patria in his letters refers not to Italy but to Venice.
Canova’s breakthrough came in 1783 with the commission to create the tomb of Pope Clement XIV (d. 1774) for the Church of the Holy Apostles in Rome. This monument was so admired on its completion in 1788 that it won Canova renown across Europe and a status he retained for the rest of his life; those who loved the austere classicism of his work acclaimed him as ‘the new Phidias’. His success was all the more remarkable because it was the common belief that the genius of Italy and its people had faded. The French writer Stendhal caught the mood when he commented that Canova ‘had emerged quite by chance out of the sheer inertia which this warm climate imposed, but he is a freak. Nobody else [in Italy] is the least like him.’ Exquisite pieces such the Cupid and Psyche, with Psyche stretching upwards to place her arms around Cupid as he bends over her, or more formal tombs, such as that to Pope Clement XIII (d. 1769) in St Peter’s itself, completed in 1792, consolidated his reputation. He could pass from classical myth to commemoration of popes without embarrassment, just as Titian could.
Like most Italians, Canova was caught up in the turmoil of Napoleon’s invasions, shut up in Rome when Napoleon besieged the city in 1797 and affected more directly when Napoleon included some of his most prized plaster models among the works of art taken from the city. Then came the news of the spoliation of Venice itself, which upset Canova profoundly. With the Italians seemingly humiliated in their traditional role as the creators and guardians of some of the world’s finest art, Canova was seen to embody the continuing genius of Italy. ‘You are a true power in the world,’ exclaimed his friend Count Leopoldo Cicognara, later director of the Venetian Academy. ‘You have a glory common to extraordinary influence, namely, that of having made a revolution in the arts, like the one the military powers are making in politics.’ In 1806 Canova won the commission to design a tomb for the Piedmontese poet Vittorio Alfieri in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. The church was already being associated with the cause of Italian nationalism and was a fitting resting place for Alfieri, whose poems had championed Italy against the French. Canova introduced the figure of Italia, depicted mourning on the sarcophagus of the poet.
Yet there was no escaping the looming power of France. As early as 1797 Napoleon recognized Canova’s talent, promising to keep paying him the annuity which Venice had awarded him in exchange for a sculpture; but, like so many of Napoleon’s promises, it was never honoured. As Napoleon consolidated his position and became ever more interested in his own commemoration, it was inevitable that Canova would be approached to serve him. The call to Paris came in 1802 through the French ambassador in Rome, François Cacault, but Canova, still smarting at Napoleon’s treatment of Italy and the arrogance with which he had treated Pius VI (d. 1800) and his successor Pius VII, resisted it. He claimed that his health was bad and that the roads to Paris were impassable. It took pressure from the conciliatory Pius VII, who feared the repercussions if Napoleon’s anger were aroused, to get him on his way. When Canova did arrive in Paris he refused to stay at Napoleon’s court but lodged instead with the papal nuncio as if to stress his independence. As he entered the Tuileries palace he must have passed the Venetian horses, still then on their piers, and he complained at once to Napoleon of the despoiling of Italy and in particular the seizure of the treasures of Venice. He even referred to the letter in which Quatremère de Quincy had inveighed against the dismemberment of Italy’s cultural centres.
Napoleon took the attack in surprisingly good part. Like most bullies, he respected someone who would stand up to him; but he also seems to have been overawed by the achievements of the sculptor. Eventually Canova agreed to produce two works: a portrait bust of Napoleon, which became one of the canonical images of the emperor (it was this one that Napoleon’s sister Elisa reproduced), and, more controversially, a gigantic sculpture of Napoleon as the god Mars in his role as peacemaker, the latter for the staggering price of 120,000 francs. The notion of Napoleon as a peacemaker could be justified by reference to the short-lived Treaty of Amiens, which did bring peace to Europe for a time in 1802; but the role became increasingly unsustainable as Napoleon set off on new conquests.
The challenge for Canova was how to merge the figure of Napoleon with the image of a classical god. He proposed that the emperor, who had wished to be sculpted in uniform, be shown in the nude, as Greek heroes and Hellenistic monarchs had been. Napoleon’s advisers, including Vivant Denon, supported the proposal. A costume was rooted in time, they argued; nudity, by contrast, was timeless, as befitted such a great conqueror. Napoleon, initially reluctant, eventually gave in to their flattery, but his reservations proved to have been well founded. In 1810, before the Mars had arrived in Paris, the emperor unveiled another nude statue, to the hero Desaix, a general who had fallen in Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians at Marengo in 1800. It was greeted with embarrassment and ridicule by the Paris crowds. Whatever the intellectuals felt, the decently togaed figures of the Roman republic were seen as a much more appropriate model from the past. Napoleon himself was gaining weight and he must have realized that the portrayal of his sagging figure as nude muscled hero would be received with disbelief. By now, moreover, it was becoming all too clear to a wearied French public that they were led by a warmonger, not a peacemaker.
When the statue arrived in Paris in 1811, Napoleon received it with coldness and then forbade public access to it. Denon had the unhappy task of telling Canova that the destination of the statue remained undecided. Canova was deeply hurt – it was the only one of his statues that was ever rejected. Eventually it was bought by the British government, which gave it to the duke of Wellington, and it still stands in the duke’s London home, Apsley House (where, a later report suggested, the servants used it to prop their bicycles against). A plan to have a copy placed in the Roman Forum between two of the surviving triumphal arches also came to nothing. It would never have survived the derision of the Roman citizenry.
In 1810, before the Mars had arrived in Paris, Canova had paid another visit to the city – this time on the direct orders of Napoleon. Since the latter had by now declared himself king of Italy, Canova had become one of his subjects and could hardly refuse. The fresh commission was to make a statue of Napoleon’s new empress, Marie-Louise of Austria, and the piece was duly completed in 1814 – by which time the days of Napoleon’s empire were over. Meeting Napoleon at the chateau of Fontainebleau, Canova again amazed the courtiers by the confidence with which he confronted the emperor over his treatment of Italy, forcing the emperor to agree to new patronage of artists and archaeological excavations. But little of what Napoleon promised was ever paid, and on his return to Rome Canova found that his acceptance of yet another Bonaparte commission had made him vulnerable to public disapproval. He had to tread carefully. As principal of the city’s Accademia of San Luca, which trained students in art, he was, of course, expected to attend the annual prizegiving; but with Rome directly ruled by the French (as it had been since 1809, when Pius VII had been exiled), this was clearly going to be a French propaganda show. Napoleon’s pretensions to be the heir of the Roman emperors were underlined by holding the ceremony on the Capitoline Hill, the most sacred spot of ancient Rome. One speech by a French functionary caught the new mood of bombastic flattery.
Winners, come forward! … You may expect all things from your great benefactor! Raise high on the Palatine a new palace to Caesar, raise new arches of triumph where Constantine entered, where another will enter who is greater than he! Paint on your palace walls [presumably the ‘palace’ in which the students painted] his marvellous deeds with which the whole world is resounding.
It is good to report that Canova failed to attend the ceremony – he had, he said, to be in Florence overseeing some final details of his monument to Vittorio Alfieri. The snub could not have been more pointed; but just how powerless he was was shown the next year when Vivant Denon descended on Italy in search of more loot despite Napoleon’s promise to Canova a few months earlier that no more would be taken. The French occupation of Rome, for all its blustering rhetoric of liberation from the superstition and tyranny of the church, was profoundly unpopular, and became even more so when military conscription was introduced to replenish the French armies as Napoleon’s empire crumbled. When the French eventually left Rome in 1814, Pius VII was welcomed back with rejoicing.
There were still many in Italy who criticized Canova for having had anything at all to do with Napoleon. Pius had appointed him Director of Museums in Rome before going into exile, and he had kept the post when the French took over, hoping – unrealistically, as it turned out – to prevent further French looting of the city. To those who knew little of his spirited personal attacks on Napoleon he looked like a collaborator, especially as he also fulfilled commissions for many members of Napoleon’s family, the most celebrated of them the reclining statue of Napoleon’s sister Pauline (who was married to the Roman Prince Borghese) as Venus Victrix, the conquering goddess of love, which is still to be seen in the Borghese collection in Rome.* In fact, he maintained a remarkable degree of freedom. In these same years he managed to do work for the Austrian Habsburgs and the royal family of Naples, both enemies of Napoleon. He even designed a massive tomb for Lord Nelson, who had died while destroying Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar, and it is possible that there was a touch of subversion in his work for the Bonapartes. A statue of Napoleon’s mother appears to be directly inspired by an original of the Empress Agrippina, the mother of the deranged emperor Nero. The pope certainly remained warmly appreciative of Canova and, when the time came to send an envoy to Paris to reclaim the Vatican treasures, saw him as the ideal candidate.
When Canova arrived in the city in August 1815 his mission was a particularly delicate one. Unlike the allies, he had no troops to back his demands, and Pius VI had signed the treaty of Tolentino, which included a clause stating that it was binding on the papacy for ever. Already a letter from Pius to Louis XVIII asking for the return of the Vatican’s art works had been met with a blank refusal. In the circumstances Canova’s achievements in the ensuing negotiations, on behalf of both Rome and his native Venice, were remarkable. The secret seems to have lain in his relationship with the ‘viper Hamilton’. Canova always got on well with Englishmen, having met many in his early years in Venice, where they were respected as generous and often well-informed patrons. It was rare for Italians to speak English at that time (French was the most prestigious second language), but one report claims that Canova spoke English ‘fluently’ and there is some evidence that he and Hamilton had already met in Rome. They certainly built a profitable relationship, and Hamilton was soon giving Canova access to those British diplomatic documents which dealt with negotiations over the plunder. Canova knew that the biggest hurdle was the Treaty of Tolentino, but he persuaded Hamilton that the pope had in fact not been entitled to make a treaty giving away what did not strictly belong to him. Hamilton in his turn helped Canova construct an argument which he felt the British foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, to whom Hamilton was responsible, would accept. The best strategy, Hamilton advised, was to stress the unique position of Rome as a great repository of the arts. Castlereagh’s support was won and proved decisive. On 30 September it was formally agreed by the allies that the pope should have his statues back.
Canova was exhausted by his efforts. The open hostility of the French crowds had been particularly distressing: when he tried to visit the Halle d’Études of the Académie Française he was pelted with bread pellets by the students, and he overheard one of the artists saying that he would like to stick a dagger into him. Denon addressed him to his face not as Ambassadeur, as his formal status required, but as emballeur, ‘packer’. But his position among the occupiers was assured, and he gained so much respect among the allied negotiators that other Italian cities began asking for his help in getting their own treasures back. His greatest coup was to forge a working relationship with the Austrian emperor, Francis II. Under the peace treaties, the Austrians were to be given permanent control of Venice, and any Venetian works of art in Paris were thus technically now Austrian rather than Venetian. Francis would have been entitled to have had them in Vienna, but he acquiesced in the argument advanced by Canova, like Quincy de Quatremère before him: that the setting of a work of art was as important as its intrinsic quality. The horses were to be returned, under the auspices of the Austrians, to Venice, and even before they had left Paris Francis was consulting with Canova over where they should be placed.
So the horses were scheduled to be taken down from the Arc du Carrousel. On 25 September, an aide-de-camp of the prince of Schwarzenberg, the commander of the Austrian troops, visited Denon to tell him of the decision to dismantle the arch. This is a public monument, protested Denon, and falls outside any agreements that have been made. There was nothing he could do; but a rising tide of anger showed that the horses had captured the imagination of the French more than many of the other treasures. Crowds crammed the area around them in protest. It was cleared, and on 27 September Austrian troops closed off all the streets leading to the arch. When more crowds gathered along the quais by the Seine, they were scattered by Austrian cavalry. Henry Milton tells how the only place from which the French themselves were allowed to view the dismantlement was the gallery of the Louvre, where they mingled with English visitors. That whole day was spent getting just two of the horses down. English engineers were sent up to help, and they were seen cavorting in the chariot. Rumours later spread that it was English soldiers who scraped the gilding off the horses, although we now know that the scoring was deliberately done in antiquity.
In its issue of 3 October the London Courier published a letter from a correspondent in Paris, reviewing the events of the past few days.
I just now find that the Austrians are taking down the bronze horses from the Arch. The whole court of the Tuileries, and the Place de Carrousel are filled with Austrian infantry and cavalry under arms; no person is allowed to approach; the troops on guard amount to several thousands; there are crowds of French in all the avenues leading to it who give vent to their feelings by shouts and execrations … the number of cannons of the bridges has been increased.
By 1 October the horses were off the arch and the figures of Victory and Peace and the chariot were seen lying on the ground in pieces. The monument was sacked, its bas-reliefs pulled off, but the statue of the emperor designed for it was left untouched in the Orangerie of the Louvre. Louis XVIII is reported to have observed the unhappy scene from the windows of the Tuileries. Henry Milton concludes his own description: ‘Justice, policy and good taste all imperiously demanded that this ill-devised trophy should not be suffered to exist, but it was impossible not to feel some pity for the humiliation and misery of the French.’
On 16 October Canova was able to write in a letter:
The cause of the Fine Arts is at length safe in port … we are at last beginning to drag forth from this great cavern of stolen goods the precious objects of art stolen from Rome … yesterday the Dying Gladiator left his French abode and the [Belvedere] Torso. We removed today the two first statues of the world, the Apollo [Belvedere] and the Laocoön … the most valuable of the statues are to go off by land, accompanied by the celebrated Venetian horses.
Some of the works from Venice, in particular a Veronese ceiling, proved too difficult to move and remain in the Louvre to this day. The winged lion did eventually return, but only after an unhappy experience. While being dismantled from its position in the Esplanade des Invalides, it was dropped and broke into fragments, to the jeers of the watching French crowds. Finally reassembled and hoisted back on to its pedestal in Venice, it was high enough up for the repairs and restorations not to be noticed. Other works from Rome were left in Paris; about half the paintings taken, for instance, never returned, and there were some who criticized Canova for not doing more. Those who appreciated the complications of his mission knew better. An oration in his honour read before the Roman Academy of Archaeology in 1816 proclaimed that his restitution had prevented the loss of Italy’s creative genius.
Meanwhile the Arc du Carrousel stood empty for only a few years. The memory of the horses was so powerful that a minor victory by the French over the Spanish in the 1820s was used as an excuse for recreating the quadriga, complete with replicas of the Venetian horses. This remains intact in Paris today.
After his mission was successfully completed, Canova recognized the help he had been given by the British by creating four ‘Ideal Heads’, three of which he sent to Hamilton, Castlereagh and Wellington respectively. That for Hamilton was inscribed: ‘Antonio Canova made this gladly for William Hamilton a man of distinction and a friend in acknowledgement of his exceptional goodwill to himself and of his patronage in the recovery of artistic monuments from France’. Hamilton returned the compliment by asking Canova to come to England for a proper viewing of the most famous antique sculptures in existence, those brought by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens. How these helped reinvigorate the debate over the horses of St Mark’s is the subject of the next chapter.