Cork in 50 Artworks, No 50: The Canova Casts, Crawford Art Gallery
Mary Beard at the Crawford in 2019, removing a fig leaf from one of the Canova Casts for her BBC series Shock of the Nude. Picture: BBC
Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor who died, aged 64, 200 years ago this year. He is best-known for his marble sculptures, such as Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss and Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, which are now in the Louvre in Paris and Apsley House in London respectively. Canova never set foot in Cork in his life, and yet his work is familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Crawford Art Gallery, where a collection of his casts, commissioned by Pope Pius VII and gifted to the city by the Prince Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, is on permanent display.
How the Canova Casts made their way from the Vatican to London and then on to Cork is the stuff of legend. “Pius VII was incarcerated by Napoleon for many years,” explains Dr Michael Waldron, assistant curator of Collections at the Crawford. “After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Pius was released, and he campaigned for the return of the art taken by Napoleon from Rome. Canova was already a well-known artist, and Pius sent him to Paris to retrieve the Vatican artworks from what is now the Louvre. It wasn’t possible to bring them all back to Rome, so part of Canova’s job was to select what would be taken.
