Penitent Magdalene

A sculpture like this was undoubtedly among those that most irritated the strict Neoclassicists, the rigorous theorists who continually reproached him for persisting in inventing instead of remaking the antique, and for drawing inspiration from life. Even more, perhaps, they judged his condemnation of the abhorred art of the 17th century too lukewarm: it turned out, on the contrary, that the Venetian sculptor had several times expressed his admiration for Bernini and Rusconi. It is difficult to draw distinctions of any kind within an artist's work, but it seems fairly evident that the sculptures by Canova that most appeal even to the sophisticated taste of our own day are precisely those born as a natural and spontaneous consequence of the Mannerist and Baroque sculptural tradition. It even seems that the not always happy experiments that the sculptor was carrying out at the same time in a more rigorous classicist grammar sharpened his natural, subtly naturalistic propensities.