Daedalus and Icarus

The enthusiastic official exaltation between the 18th and 19th centuries, and subsequently the polemical, bitter demystification carried out by artistic currents drawing on more recent aesthetic conceptions, ended up distorting any reasonable historical and cultural perspective in the assessment of Canova's personality. The sculpture of the master from Possagno was not an abstract “miracle”, free of any contingent reference to times, schools and figurative traditions. Venetian by birth and education, the sculptor would never betray the typical “forma mentis” of his people, made more of empiricism than of theory, of sensibility than of formal rigour. Canova's immediate precedents were Corradini and Torretti, but what counted more for his receptive sensibility were the luministic and pictorial premises and the sensuous naturalism which, from Mariani to Vittoria, had been determining elements in the formation of the Hellenistic-Baroque language of the early Bernini and of so much 17th- and 18th-century sculpture.