by Susan Jaques
With his return, Pius VII began the process of restoring the Church and the city of Rome. A rift arose between Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca (secretary of state, 1814–15), who favored going back to conservative eighteenth-century ideals, and Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, who wanted to maintain some of the more liberal reforms of the French.
Pius retained much of the Napoleonic code, along with improvements like street lighting and house numbering.4 At the same time, he reestablished the conservative Jesuit order banned by Clement XIV in 1773 and made Rome’s Jews return to the ghetto that had been abolished by Napoleon.5 Somewhat ironically, Pius became a hero for the Risorgimento, Italy’s nationalist movement.6 In 1821, members of the Carbonari, a secret society calling for constitutional reforms and Italian unity, were arrested across Italy. That year, Pius published a bull condemning the Carbonari and the Masons, and their objectives.
Pius resumed his earlier art patronage including archaeological excavations, the restoration of monuments, and expansion of the Vatican museums. Projects included the restoration of the Arch of Titus and an excavation of Constantine’s basilica, the precursor of St. Peter’s. He also continued the work of the French at the Forum, temples, and the Via Sacra.7 Valadier was rehired to reconfigure the Piazza del Popolo, scene of his triumphal entry, and the ramps and terraces on the adjacent Pincio. For the Piazza del Popolo, Valadier designed four identical buildings at the corners, relocated the existing fountain, and designed a new fountain around the obelisk.
Pius also removed Napoleon’s lavish refurbishments at the Quirinale. In the piazza, he added a basin to the Dioscuri fountain and the inscription “pivs. vii. pom” on the base of the obelisk between the figures of Castor and Pollux. The message was subtle but symbolic, writes Roberta Olson. “Since antiquity, Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, were viewed as guardian figures of Rome, and Pius VII was the ottocento guardian of Rome and its heritage.”8
A February 1816 visit to see the restored art from Paris inspired Pius to reorganize the Vatican galleries. To the Museo Chiaramonti, established in 1807 with Antonio Canova’s help, he added an elegant sculpture gallery, the Braccio Nuovo, or New Wing. Begun in 1817 by Raffaele Stern and finished after his death in 1820 by Pasquale Belli, the nearly 230-foot-long gallery is considered one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in Rome.
To create an authentic setting, Stern and Belli used colored marble repurposed from Roman buildings. For the floor, large marble slabs framed original Roman mosaics illustrating the Odyssey. Adorning the walls were Francesco Massimiliano Laboureur’s stucco friezes inspired by antique reliefs. On either end of the gallery, Egyptian granite columns decorated the doors. Canova, president of the Committee for the Fine Arts whose members included Filippo Aurelio Visconti and Antonio D’Este, curated the display of the gallery which opened in February 1822. (After an extensive restoration, the Braccio Nuovo reopened in January 2017.)
Below a coffered barrel-vault ceiling with skylights, twenty-eight niches housed larger-than-life statues of emperors and Roman replicas of famous Greek statues. In between, busts of antiquity’s superstars were placed on corbels, half columns, and consoles. One of the masterworks of the gallery was the recently returned Nile, a Roman copy of a first-century Hellenistic statue of the great Egyptian river and its tributaries.
Among the treasures was a new acquisition—the Minerva Giustiniani (late-fifth to early-fourth century B.C.E.) Discovered in the early seventeenth century on the Esquiline Hill, the Roman copy of a Greek original depicts the goddess of wisdom and warfare wearing a helmet. Bought in 1805 by Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte for his Rome residence, the Palazzo Nunez, the Parian marble escaped export to Paris with the rest of the Giustiniani collection two years later.
Meanwhile, Canova financed a series of fifteen allegorical lunettes for the long, narrow Galleria Chiaramonti. Cardinal Consalvi chose the subjects—historical events and arts-related projects sponsored by Pius VII. Canova hired his protégé Francesco Hayez to paint five of the lunettes. The central fresco, The Issue of Laws Protecting Antiquities by Vincenzo Ferreri is the only scene featuring Pius.9
The Allies decided that the paintings from Paris should be displayed together rather than going back to their original locations. With his predecessor’s picture gallery now housing the Raphael tapestries, Pius created a new Pinacoteca Vaticana in the former Borgia apartments, named for Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo de Borja. Among the chosen masterworks were twenty-six canvases returned from Paris. These included Raphael’s celebrated Transfiguration, Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà or Lament over the Dead Christ, Poussin’s Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, and a pair of predella panels by Fra Angelico.
Hung alongside these were selected pictures from the Quirinale, Capitoline, and Papal apartments, along with Titian’s Madonna in Glory from Venice and two Veroneses—Vision of St. Helena and an Allegory. Also installed in the new Pinacoteca was another acquisition, the Aldobrandini Wedding. Named for its owner, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the wealthy art-loving nephew of Pope Clement VIII, the Roman fresco was bought in 1818 at the recommendation of Canova’s acquisitions commission.10
Also added permanently to the Vatican collections were paintings by Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Perugino previously in Perugia and Foligno. Some had belonged to churches and convents in the Papal States. Among these were Raphael’s Transfiguration, Caravaggio’s Deposition from Santa Maria in Vallicella, The Communion of St. Jerome by Domenichino, Andrea Sacchi’s Saint Romuald, and Barocci’s Annunciation and Blessed Michelina. When the original owners protested, Cardinal Consalvi responded that the returned canvases had been reconsigned to Pius by the Allies for public display.11
With thousands of repatriated paintings and sculptures, Italy was confronted with the question of what to do with art removed from its suppressed churches and convents. According to Valter Curzio, the return of the Napoleonic plunder played a key role in the formation of a handful of important museums, including the Pinoteca in Bologna, the Galleria Nazionale dell’ Umbria in Perugina, Milan’s Pinacoteca Brera, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.12
When Napoleon’s soldiers took Pius VI prisoner, the papal tiaras were looted. For his papal coronation in Venice, Pius VII wore a papier-mâché tiara decorated with silver cloth and jewels donated by aristocratic Venetian women. In 1805, Napoleon gave Pius a new tiara, ironically made with objects from the looted ones. But considering it too heavy and not liking the glowing inscriptions to Napoleon, Pius kept wearing the papier-mâché tiara. In 1820, Pius received a new silver tiara, but seemed to prefer wearing the paper one.13
Pius had refurbished and then stayed at the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo in 1804 and 1805 after Napoleonic troops invaded the Papal States. Now he returned to the retreat above Lake Albano, some twenty miles south of Rome. Urban VIII built the palace in the early seventeenth century on the ruins of the favorite villa of Roman emperor Domitian. Designed by imperial architect Rabirius, the three-story villa featured a small theater, a terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, and a covered passageway or cryptoporticus that still survives.
With the art restitution from Paris came a sense that Rome was reborn. “Rome is yet the capital of the world. It is a city of palaces and temples, more glorious than those which any other city contains, and of ruins more glorious than they,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. After being inaccessible for years, the city again attracted tourists. Its antique art had become even more famous as a result of the pillage. In 1819, the Prince Regent commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint the pope’s portrait in Rome. In the background, to the left of the seated Pius, Lawrence added the Chiaramonti Gallery with three of its recently returned treasures—the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso, and the Laocoön.
In July 1823, Pius VII fell in the papal apartments and fractured his hip. The news of a devastating July 16 fire that destroyed much of S. Paolo fuori le Mura and its artworks was kept from the bedridden pontiff.14 Wi
th Cardinal Consalvi at his side, the eighty-one-year-old died on August 20, bringing an end to his stormy twenty-three-year pontificate. After a funeral on August 25, Pius VII was buried in Saint Peter’s Clementine Chapel. Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen sculpted his marble tomb monument.
After two challenging months in Paris and with the bronze horses en route to Venice, Antonio Canova left for London. As a gesture of thanks for their support, Canova presented female Ideal Heads to the Prince Regent, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Castlereagh. The sculptor inscribed a fourth bust to his ally Hamilton: “Antonio Canova made this gladly for William Hamilton a man of distinction and a friend in acknowledgement of his exceptional goodwill to himself and of his patronage in the recovery of artistic monuments from France.”15
Ironically, the person who had just recovered part of Rome’s cultural patrimony became involved with the Elgin Marbles. In 1802, in a move worthy of Denon, Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, the seventh Earl of Elgin, detached nearly half of the Parthenon frieze along with seventeen sculptures from the pediments and fifteen marble panels. As Lord Elgin’s secretary at the time, William Hamilton supervised the removal of the frieze. Its arrival in London sparked a national debate. Byron attacked Elgin for exporting the marbles from the Acropolis in Athens, then under Ottoman control.
Though Canova never traveled to Athens, he was considered an authority on classical Greek sculpture. During his early training in Venice, he had copied plaster casts of Greek statues at the Palazzo Farsetti; he had also seen Greek sculpture in Italy. In 1803, Lord Elgin visited Canova’s studios in Rome with drawings, molds, and a few fragments of the Elgin Marbles, asking him to undertake a restoration. Canova told him it would be a sacrilege to touch the masterpiece. Now the sculptor was asked to examine the looted Parthenon frieze and weigh in on whether it was a Greek original or a Roman copy.
Canova declared the “stupendous and unforgettable” works to be original, perhaps by the hand of the most celebrated Greek sculptor of antiquity. As Athens’s state artist in the fifth century B.C.E., Phidias participated in the design and supervision of the Parthenon’s sculptural program. Among his other masterworks were monumental gold and ivory statues of Zeus (Rome’s Jupiter) and Athena (Rome’s Minerva) for their temples at Olympia and Athens.16
Canova raved about the pilfered marbles in a letter to Quatremère. “I saw the Greek marbles, nothing artificial, exaggerated, nor harsh. The works of Fidias are real flesh, beautiful Nature. I must confess dear friend that seeing such beautiful things has heightened my self-esteem because I have always been convinced that the great maestros had to work in this way and in no other way.”17 As the “Phidias of Europe,” Canova’s opinion carried tremendous weight. His conclusion helped persuade the British government to acquire the Elgin Marbles for the nation for 35,000 pounds. Greece continues to demand their return from the British Museum.
Canova received a warm reception in London, where he secured several important commissions. In the wake of the Allies’ victory over Napoleon, the Prince Regent ordered Mars and Venus, an allegory of war and peace for Carlton House. Distracted by the seductive Venus, Mars no longer has much use for his shield, spear, and sword. Canova adorned Mars’s plumed Roman helmet with a British lion, but ignored the Prince Regent’s request to have his profile carved on the shield. Before Canova left London, the Prince Regent gave him a diamond snuffbox with his portrait and a five hundred-pound note tucked inside.
The British government also commissioned a cenotaph for the exiled Stuarts, to join Canova’s funerary monument for Clement XIII in St. Peter’s Basilica. Commemorating the last three members of the Royal House of Stuart, the truncated pyramid-shaped monument features a trio of bas-relief portraits of the Stuart princes—James III and his sons Bonnie Prince Charlie and Henry. Two weeping angels flank the monument’s closed doors, symbolizing the passage from life to death (the Stuarts are buried in the crypt below).
On December 1, Canova and his stepbrother dined at the Royal Academy. Four days later, Hamilton hosted a farewell dinner for Canova who was to leave London the next morning. The mild-mannered sculptor made a favorable impression. According to one of the guests, R. Smirke, “. . . what English He [Canova] does speak is remarkably pure and correct.” Royal portraitist Thomas Lawrence “said He thought the manners of Canova a pattern for an Artist; that he had modest but manly comportment.”18 Earlier in his stay, Canova sat for his portrait by Lawrence.
Though only about half of the paintings taken to France were returned to Rome, Canova was welcomed as a hero for his efforts in the restitution when he arrived back on January 3, 1816.19 The next day, a grateful Pius VII awarded Canova the title marquis of Ischia di Castro. Canova donated the annual three thousand scudi among various art academies. For his marquisate, he chose the lyre and the snake, emblems of Orpheus and Eurydice.20 Pius also inscribed Canova’s name in the Libro d’oro or Golden Book on the Campidoglio, and bestowed him with the highest pontifical honor—the Order of Christ.21
Later that year, Canova received another commission, his first from America. The North Carolina Senate ordered a full-length posthumous statue of George Washington for the State House in Raleigh. Virginia’s State Capitol in Richmond already boasted a Carrara marble statue of Washington in his military uniform by Jean-Antoine Houdon. The renowned French sculptor had traveled to Mount Vernon in 1785 to take measurements and model a life mask of Washington. Two decades later, consulted again on what sculptor to hire for the Raleigh statue, Thomas Jefferson replied: “There can be but one answer to this. Old Canove of Rome.”22
Canova had little to work with for the portrait of the six-foot-two-inch president.23 Relying on a bust of Washington supplied by an American diplomat, Canova produced a series of preparatory sketches, a nude plaster model, and a full-sized clothed plaster model. According to Xavier Salomon, naked models were part of Canova’s artistic process. “He always did a nude model of his sculptures so he could understand how the body worked under the drapery. . . . He would start with rough drawings and then move to three-dimensional plaster models such as this one.”24
But Canova did not repeat the mistake of the nude Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. Though two decades earlier Jefferson had recommended a military uniform for Houdon’s sculpture of Washington, he now expressed a different opinion. “as to the style or costume, I am sure the artist, and every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman, the effect of which is undoubtedly of a different order. our boots & regimentals have a very puny effect,” wrote Jefferson in 1816.25
Following Jefferson’s instruction, Canova sculpted the president in Roman attire. Canova found references for the commission among the depictions of Roman generals and emperors, particularly a Seated Claudius uncovered in Herculaneum.26 He sculpted Washington seated on a throne-like chair, holding a quill while drafting his farewell address on a stone tablet perched on his left leg. A sword lay at his feet. In anticipation of the statue, the Raleigh Register reported: “Even the celebrated Statues of the Apollo of Belvedere and the Venus of Medici have their blemishes, but the Statue of Washington, like Washington himself, is without a stain or spot.”27 When the marble arrived in Raleigh in December 1821, it attracted crowds of tourists, and Canova was likened to Phidias and Praxiteles. Sadly a decade later, a fire in the State House completely destroyed the portrait (a replica was placed in the center of the rotunda in 1970).
Also in 1816, Canova finished the statue of Elisa Baciocchi as Polyhymnia, muse of history. With Napoleon’s sister off the Tuscan throne, Canova sold the work to Count Cesare Bianchetti of Bologna. After being displayed at the Accademia in Venice, the marble left for Vienna where it was exhibited by Titian’s Assumption. Canova also finished Marie Louise as Concordia. In Spring 1817, he sent the portrait to Parma where Marie Louise had been installed as ruler by the Congress of Vienna after her husband’s exile. Canova depicted her seated, holding the sacrificial patera, with cornucopia decorating the relie
fs of her throne (today in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma).
Another of Canova’s projects during this time was an equestrian statue of Charles III of Naples. After becoming king of Naples, Joseph Bonaparte commissioned Canova to produce an equestrian statue of his brother. The bronze monument was to stand in a semicircular piazza to be created in front of the royal palace (today’s Piazza del Plebiscito). Canova’s portrayal of Napoleon looking over his shoulder and encouraging his troops was criticized as overly dramatic. With the Bourbons’ return to Naples, Charles III, father of the new king, replaced Napoleon. Canova, who was not a fan of the Neapolitan Bourbons, changed his original composition with Charles holding a baton.28
In mid-1819, Canova received an enthusiastic welcome in his hometown of Possagno. He supervised the quarrying of a local stone for a new church as a “beautiful memory to his homeland . . . more solid, more permanent and more visible” than the town’s old church. Financed by Canova, designed by several architects, the imposing domed and columned temple combined elements of Athens’s Parthenon and Rome’s Pantheon with an early Christian apse. Wearing the uniform of the Order of the Knights of Christ, Canova laid the cornerstone of his temple on July 11.
But Canova would not see his church completed. In October 1822, the sculptor took ill while staying in Venice at Casa Francesconi in the Orseolo basin not far from Piazza San Marco, where he was a guest of his friend Florian (owner of the famous Caffé Florian). Canova died on St. Anthony’s Day, October 13, two weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. Starting as a young man in the 1780s, Canova had suffered from severe stomach pains, the likely result of continuous pressure of a drill on his ribs during the sculpting of Pope Clement XIV’s tomb. According to the doctor who performed the autopsy, Canova died from bowel disease (male ai visceri), thought to be related to the earlier injury to his digestive tract.29 At the time, Canova was working on a series of biblical scenes for the façade of his church in Possagno. Seven were completed.