Antonio Canova

Canova was the most celebrated sculptor in Europe in his lifetime, and the central figure of neoclassicism. Born in 1757 at Possagno, in the hills north of Treviso, he was the grandson of a stonecutter and was carving professionally before he was twenty.

What separated him from the classical sculpture he admired was surface. He finished marble to an extraordinary degree — skin, hair and fabric differentiated by texture as much as by form — and worked by making a full-size plaster model first, which assistants then pointed up in marble under his supervision. The plaster models survive at Possagno, and they show the sculpture at the stage where his own hand was last on it.

He worked for Napoleon and for the papacy, and after Waterloo was sent to Paris to recover the works of art the French had removed from Italy — a diplomatic role, and largely a successful one.

He designed and paid for the Tempio Canoviano in his home village, a domed church modelled on the Pantheon, and is buried there. His reputation collapsed in the later nineteenth century, when the taste for polished neoclassicism curdled, and recovered only in the twentieth.