Friday,
July 27,
Did "Venus Victrix"
Get a "Boob Job" from Antonio Canova,
The
ANNOTICO Report
Italy's
most celebrated neoclassical sculptor, Antonio Canova, is accused of cheating in
one of his most famous works, "Venus Victrix",
(Venus the Victorious, one of the biggest draws in Rome's Galleria Borghese)
modeled by Napoleon Bonaparte's famously racy sister,
Maurizio
Bernardelli Curuz, editor
of Stile Arte, a fine art magazine, claims Canova did not merely allow the
evidence of his eyes to dictate the motions of his chisel. Instead, he made
plaster casts of her breasts to obtain a degree of realism.
Marco
Vallora, a correspondent on La Stampa,
noted that 2007 is the 250th anniversary of Canova's birth, and
that a flood of Canova exhibitions and related events is about to be unleashed.
"There is
nothing to be astonished about,It
is enough to announce a major exhibition, and promises of scandals and
discoveries start to pour down. Then as soon as the exhibition opens, they
all cease. It's punctual, scientific, like thunder after lightning, only in
this case the thunder arrives first."
Whether this is
someone seeking Publicity for their Magazine, or a Publicity scheme to spike
attendance at the Exhibitions, it is safe to say that never before will
someone's breasts undergo such amateur "scientific scrutiny" and
"analysis".
Celebrated Italian Sculptor
(Allegedly)'Cheated with Plaster Casts'
Venus Victrix, or Venus the Victorious, is one of the biggest
draws in Rome's Galleria Borghese, is a portrait in white marble -
covered in a thin layer of wax, to heighten the realistic effect - of Napoleon
Bonaparte's famously racy sister,
But Canova's
innovations did not stop there, according to Mr Curuz. The artist, he claims, created unprecedentedly realistic breasts by the simple device of
obtaining plaster casts from life. "The story begins with a piece of
evidence straight out of a police drama," Curuz
writes. "I have in front of me the plaster cast of the breast of
The breast, in
other words, is beautiful - but in a way that distinguishes it from the beauty of the
classical tradition. "This is not, to sum up, the conventional breast
of Greek statuary, connected to the evocation of a perfect, platonic ideal
of woman. However sublime the form, it has something
of the phenomenal about it, something concrete."
The clinching
fact, according to the critic, is the nipple as represented in the
surviving plaster cast: instead of standing proud and round, he writes, it is "slightly
squashed, giving the impression of two slightly parted lips."
For Curuz this proves that Canova's illustrious model permitted
the artist to slap wet plaster over her torso, in the interests of artistic
perfection - but in stark contradiction of the traditions of classicism.
Mr Curuz's
claims are published on the magazine's website, in a taster for a
fuller article in which he promises to stand them up.
But he will have
a fight on his hands. It did not escape the attention of Marco Vallora, a correspondent on La Stampa,
that 2007 is the 250th anniversary of Canova's birth, and that a flood
of Canova exhibitions and related events is about to be unleashed.
"There is
nothing to be astonished about," he writes. "It is enough to announce
a major exhibition, and promises of scandals and discoveries start to pour
down. Then as soon as the exhibition opens, they all cease. It's punctual,
scientific, like thunder after lightning, only in this case the thunder arrives
first."
The claims are
pure hokum,
Mr Vallora suggests. Where
is the proof, he demands, that Mme Bonaparte allowed the artist to take such
astounding liberties. "Letters? Documents? Proof?... I am dubious,
not so much on account of the ban on using plaster casts... but, above all,
from the point of view of social convenience.
"Would
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