Italian School; After Antonio Canova, XIX century.

Italian school; After ANTONIO CANOVA (Italy, 1757 - 1822), XIX century.
"Italic Venus".
Marble.
Measurements: 65 cm (height).
Marble bust of the Italic Venus, realized according to one of the four versions of the Venere Italica sculpted by Antonio Canova between 1804 and 1822. Antonio Canova conceived the Venere Italica in the context of an Italian artistic movement intended to replace the Medici Venus in the Uffizi Gallery, after its transfer to Palermo to protect it from the sacking by Napoleonic troops. However, after diplomatic pressure exerted by Talleyrand, the sculpture was finally sent to Paris to be incorporated into the Musée Napoléon (now the Louvre Museum), where it was exhibited as early as 1803.
Napoleon Bonaparte himself had expressed his interest in the Venus de Medici during the first campaigns in Italy. In a letter to the French Directory in July 1796, he wrote: "I have seen in Florence the famous Venus that is missing in our museum...". Since that visit, Tommaso Puccini, director of the Uffizi and Bonaparte's personal guide in the museum, understood the danger that the famous sculpture was in. Consequently, he had the Medici Venus moved to Palermo in 1800, along with other masterpieces of the collection, to preserve them from Republican plundering. However, Puccini was aware that the work was still under threat, as evidenced by the transfer of the Apollo from the Belvedere to Paris, so he considered it necessary to commission a new Venus, modern and worthy of the original, from Antonio Canova, the most eminent sculptor of his time.
During a visit of Canova to Florence in 1802, Puccini asked him for a reinterpretation of the Medici Venus, not as a mere copy of the then known statue, altered by numerous modern restorations criticized in the eighteenth century, but as an ideal version, imagined according to the spirit of the ancient sculpture or, at least, corrected by the sensitivity of Canova himself.
The sculptor, initially reluctant, accepted the commission and ended up conceiving not only a Venus inspired by the ancient model, but a completely new creation, imbued with his own ideal of beauty. Thus, the purpose of reproducing the Venus de Medici gradually evolved into the desire to create a new vision of Venus, more in keeping with neoclassical aesthetics and his quest for formal perfection. The difficulty lay, moreover, in satisfying both the admirers accustomed to the restoration of the original and the scholars who denounced the deficiencies of such interventions.
Four main versions of the Venere Italica emerged from this creative process: The Venere di Monaco (Munich Residenz), completed for Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1810. The Venere Italica proper, completed in 1811 for the Uffizi, then moved to Palazzo Pitti after the return of the Medici Venus in 1815. A version commissioned by Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, made between 1811 and 1814 and now disappeared and finally, The Venus Hope, completed in 1820 for Thomas Hope and preserved since 1959 in the City Art Gallery in Leeds.
It is worth noting the close affinity between the face of the Venus Italica and the famous portrait of Paulina Borghese as Venus Victorious, also by Canova. Although Paulina almost certainly posed personally for the body of that sculpture, the facial treatment seems inspired by the model that the sculptor developed for the various versions of the Venus Italica.
The nuances in the modeling of the face and hair, in particular the number and arrangement of the curls on the forehead, allow us to attribute the present bust to the version preserved in the Palazzo Pitti, and not to the variants of Munich, Leeds or the Hermitage bust, the latter erroneously linked to Canova at the end of the twentieth century.
Despite the slight deterioration of the marble, the work retains the technical delicacy characteristic of the master, whose ability to give marble a luminous and lively appearance of flesh remains one of the most sublime achievements of European sculptural neoclassicism.