Cupid and Psyche

In his longing for an ideal purity, Canova naturally recovered the luministic and subtly pictorial tradition of the Venetian school and the refined preciousness of surfaces that had already informed Bernini's Ovidian fables; a delicate, indefinable restraint, however, places Canova's work in a strange alternation of Olympian splendour and soft timidity, almost uncertainty or modesty.