Cork in 50 Artworks, No 50: The Canova Casts, Crawford Art Gallery
Mary Beard at the Crawford in 2019, removing a fig leaf from one of the Canova Casts for her BBC series Shock of the Nude. Picture: BBC
Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor who died, aged 64, 200 years ago this year. He is best-known for his marble sculptures, such as Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss and Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, which are now in the Louvre in Paris and Apsley House in London respectively. Canova never set foot in Cork in his life, and yet his work is familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Crawford Art Gallery, where a collection of his casts, commissioned by Pope Pius VII and gifted to the city by the Prince Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, is on permanent display.
How the Canova Casts made their way from the Vatican to London and then on to Cork is the stuff of legend. “Pius VII was incarcerated by Napoleon for many years,” explains Dr Michael Waldron, assistant curator of Collections at the Crawford. “After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Pius was released, and he campaigned for the return of the art taken by Napoleon from Rome. Canova was already a well-known artist, and Pius sent him to Paris to retrieve the Vatican artworks from what is now the Louvre. It wasn’t possible to bring them all back to Rome, so part of Canova’s job was to select what would be taken.
“Britain helped with returning the artworks, and Pius expressed his gratitude by commissioning Canova to make plaster casts of a number of his own sculptures and many more of the Vatican’s antiquities. There were over 200 in all, including full-scale figures and friezes.”
The casts were shipped to London as a gift to the Prince Regent, the future George VI, but almost at once, the problem arose of where to accommodate them. For a time, they languished at the Custom House on the Thames, near St Paul’s Cathedral, before being moved to a pavilion in the gardens at Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence. The Prince then offered them to the Royal Academy, but was rebuffed, on the basis that the academy already had a fine collection of casts and could not find room for any more.
“The story goes that a Corkman, working as a porter at the Royal Academy, heard the casts could be had for the asking. He got word to William Hare, Viscount Ennismore and Listowel, who happened to be President of the Cork Society for Promoting the Fine Arts. Hare in turn approached the Prince Regent, who was only too happy to gift them to Cork. He had them shipped within weeks.”
On November 7, 1818, a local newspaper called The Southern Reporter heralded the casts’ arrival in Cork. There were, it reported, as many as 219 figures, busts, torsos, reliefs and fragments. The casts were installed at the former Apollo Society theatre on Patrick St, where they came to be used for drawing instruction by the tutors from the newly established Cork School of Art, whose students included Daniel Maclise and Samuel Forde. In time, ownership of the casts passed to the Royal Cork Institution, and in 1832 they were moved to the old Custom House, what is now the Crawford Art Gallery.
Throughout the 19th century, and up to the 1970s, the casts continued to be used in teaching drawing from observation. They were not always cared for as well as they might have been. Some crumbled away, others disappeared, and their number has dwindled to the point where there are now just twelve of the original casts. The survivors include three that were copied from Canova’s original marble sculptures; The Goddess Concordia, The Mother of Napoleon the Great, and Bathing Venus. Of the nine others, most were cast by Canova and his assistants from Roman or Greek sculptures from antiquity.
There are rumours that other works from the Canova collection may have found their way into homes around Cork. Waldron would love to see them if there are. “There should be an amnesty, to bring them in,” he says.
The surviving casts have been cleared and mended on a number of occasions. Most recently, this work was done by conservator Eoghan Daltun, who observed that the fig leaves covering the genitalia on Adonis, Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso, and the figures in Laocoon and His Sons appear to have been added some time after their arrival in Cork.
In June 2019, in an event billed as The Fig Reveal, these ‘modesty coverings’ were removed. The occasion was recorded for inclusion in Mary Beard’s BBC television series, The Shock of the Nude.
“Mary helped Eoghan remove Apollo Belvedere’s fig leaf," says Waldron. "We didn’t know what to expect, but a 1971 Irish ha’penny was found inside it, which confirmed that the fig leaf was not part of the original cast. We removed the fig leaves from the other sculptures too; they seem to be a lot older, and may date to Victorian times. We’ve kept them all as archival objects, and we’ll exhibit them from time to time.”
The casts continue to enthrall visitors to the gallery. “Artists like Dorothy Cross and Vivienne Roche would have encountered the casts in the 1970s when the Crawford was still a college as well as a gallery. Art students still come in to sketch them; they still have a life for people. They have an international dimension, but they’re also very much part of the history of Cork.”
- Further information: crawfordartgallery.ie
