20th Century Italian Sculpture Venere Medici Head Begin in Terracotta

Italian sculpture " Venere Medici" Head Begin 20th century Terracotta Measures: Height 50 cm Width 33 cm Depth 25 cm Weight 10 kg Artist / designer / architect Antonio Canova Manufacture Tuscany Material Terracotta The work was built as compensation for the transfer to France of the Venus de 'Medici, raked by the Napoleonic. The sculptor was ideally inspired by this work, on a spiritual level more than anything else, trying to evoke the tenderness of the flesh, its sweet vibrations, the movement in space, which it renders through the free articulation of the body and the delicacy of the nuances. The sculptor spread a soft and pink mixture to better enhance the beauty of the body of the goddess, in the act of hiding behind a cloth, probably surprised by the arrival of someone, according to the classic theme of Venus pudica. Ugo Foscolo will make a comparison between the two works, that of Canova and the ancient one, and will say of the first: "Flatter heaven in this valley of tears", wanting to express with these words the superiority of the statue of the neoclassical sculptor, this most real goddess , therefore more desirable. Note how even in this work there is a deliberate adhesion to the theories of the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann: the search for the ideal beauty, the distance from the upheaval of passions and emotions, only the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur are present. ".