Italic Venus

Antonio Canova realized several sculptures depicting Venus. The first one was realized as compensation for The Venus de’ Medici’s transfer to the Louvre, France, in 1802, following the Tolentino Peace Treaty signed by Pope Pius VI.
The artist drew inspiration from the “ideal”, and tried to re-interpret the beauty of flesh, its palpitations, the unusual movement deriving from the flexibility of the body, and paid calibrated attention to its shapes. Canova’s invention implicitly renewed the Neoclassical aesthetic sculpture, instead of producing a copy of an ancient marble, he experimented with a new proposal. He named his Venus, “Italica”, in a sense, to reclaim a strong sense of nationality for a population who had seen its artistic heritage stolen.