0788.26OrpheusEurydice

0788.26OrpheusEurydice_Canova

ogcma@byu

ClCv241

Mastery

MythMatters

Metropolitan Museum website
Ovid Met.6.146-312

Antonio Canova, "Perseus Slaying Medusa" (1799), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1967 (67.110.1).

Met sculpture is a marble replica of the original, Vatican.

C.M.S. Johns, Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe (Berkeley and LA, 1998), p. 9, cites Ottorino Stefani, I rilievi del Canova: una nuova concezione del tempo dello spazio (Milan, 1990), 64 - 65.

White marble statue of Perseus with the Head of Medusa, holding a sword, in a museum hall

"Such a work as Perseus Slaying Medusa, undertaken while the artist was in exile in the disastrous year 1799, would be difficult to interpret in isolation. Its thinly veiled theme of madness and civil war reflects Canova's anxiety about the cataclysm in Italy occasioned by the French triumph and his concern with hiw own professional future. ... He rarely took the step, however, of directly and unequivocally making political reference or commentary in his art, partly because he sensed his own, and Italy's, vulnerability, but also, I would argue, because he was conditioned to think politically in metaphor, a traditional artistic practice with a venerable pedigree." Johns p. 9

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.