Chapter XIII The Neo-Classical Revival: European Sculpture of the Revolution and the Reaction
(1789-1848 a.d.)
The period we are now to consider, covering the last few years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, is one of the most elusive in the history of sculpture. That is to say, it evades characterization. Moreover, when its individual qualities are stated, it is still more difficult to correlate these with the very definite ideas and emotions astir during a time which includes the French Revolution and the consequent Reaction.
The difficulty in tracing the connection between such men as Canova, Thorvaldsen, Flaxman, and the age in which they worked, seems to be due to the necessity for first abandoning the method which has served us hitherto. In dealing with Greek and Roman, Italian and French sculpture, we have appealed to national history—national circumstances. Now we are concerned with a body of thought and feeling which is not national but European. Instead of thinking in states, we have to think in continents. The men who created the sculpture of the Revolution and Reaction were essentially cosmopolitans; Winckelmann—Saxon; Raphael Mengs—half-Dane, half-Bohemian; Canova—Venetian; Thorvaldsen—Danish; Flaxman and Gibson—Englishmen, long resident in Rome. They did not drift towards Rome as the Hellenistic sculptors had done, because the city was the centre of the political force of the age. Nor did they come with the purpose of Michael Angelo, that they might add to the glory of a universal church seeking to extend its power over the known world. Far from this being the case, in the early part of the nineteenth century Rome was a no-man’s land. If it stood for anything, it was for a disintegrated Italy and an enfeebled Papacy. At the very time Canova was working there, Italy was powerless to prevent Napoleon stripping it of its choicest art treasures. Anything approaching a national stimulus to sculptural production was entirely lacking.
The first result was the rise of the essentially eclectic style which we recognize in the sculptures of Canova and Thorvaldsen. Nominally, it was based upon a return to the Greek example. In reality, it was no more than a borrowed Hellenism, misunderstood and misapplied by men who did no more than steal “The livery of the Court of Heaven.” We shall not be misunderstood. No one can deny—it is impossible to do so—the graceful beauty of very many statues of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Indeed, no school of sculpture has produced a larger number of popular works—in the best sense of that rather dubious term. But our criticism is justified by the fact that such men as Canova and Thorvaldsen deliberately set out to interpret their experience in the terms of classic art. They rightly judged this to be the highest achievement attained by the sculptor. Unfortunately, they only filched the Hellenic externals.
Strange to say, this fervid adoption of a bastard Hellenism coincided with the re-discovery of the principles at the root of Greek art, and, in consequence, with a renewed appreciation of the best qualities in Hellenic sculpture. Throughout the Renaissance and until the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe did not understand Greek sculpture. Even the best judges rated the “Apollo Belvedere” above the “Theseus” of the Parthenon pediment. A truer standard was advanced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (murdered 1768). His dictum, “Greek art has been perpetuated by Roman copies,” revealed the error which had vitiated all earlier criticism. Aided by the poet-philosopher Lessing, Winckelmann led men to distinguish between the Roman and the Greek elements in classic sculpture—between the Hellenic and the Hellenistic. Winckelmann’s “History of Greek Art,” published in 1764, enunciated all the great principles we now recognize in the best Greek sculpture—its truth to nature, its almost austere reserve, the preference accorded to the typical as opposed to the particular. The “History of Greek Art” in turn led to Lessing’s “Laocoon” and the magnificent exposition of Hellenism in the works of Goethe. Through these three men the very soul of Greek sculpture lay bare to the later eighteenth-century artists.
CANOVA