Antonio Canova's plaster cast of the Peace of Kiev exhibited in Florence

As of today, May 11, the plaster cast of Peace, the masterpiece by Antonio Canova (Possagno, 1757 - Venice, 1822) kept at the Khanenko Museum in Kiev and now hidden to prevent it from being damaged during the Russian-Ukrainian war, is on display in Florence’s Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio. The exhibition is intended as a means to ensure contemplation of the sculptor’s masterpiece, otherwise denied by the conflict. The work, moreover, is displayed in the Salone at the same time that the same environment sees the presence of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth Estate. The plaster cast of The Peace of Kiev will remain in Florence until Sept. 18.

The exhibition, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, realized thanks to the collaboration between the Museo Novecento and the Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova in Possagno, and organized by MUS.E with Contemplazioni, sees the sculpture installed in the center of the Sala di Leone X in Palazzo Vecchio. This setting, which features frescoes retracing the stages of the rise to power of Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who became pope under the name Leo X, acts as a counterbalance to the message carried by Canova’s sculpture, whose story tells of events of war and peace. This is followed by the effigy of Cosimo I de’ Medici in the guise of Mars, a manifest symbol of the duke’s rule and his expansionist policy.

Nikolai Petrovič Rumjancev (St. Petersburg, 1754 - 1826) was a Russian politician and diplomat, also mentioned by Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace. Despite a military career behind him, he was a pacifist, pro-French, admirer of Napoleon, and lover of Europe, for which he traveled from 1774 to 1776 (including to Italy), studying and meeting the likes of Voltaire. In 1811 Rumjancev commissioned Canova to create a white marble to be placed in the salon of his St. Petersburg palace. The sculpture was to pay tribute to the peace treaties that had ended three wars and that the Rumjancev family had helped to sign: the Peace of Åbo in 1743 (ending the war with Sweden), the Peace of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 (with the Ottoman Empire), and finally the Peace of Hamina in 1809 (again with Sweden). From 1808 to 1814, Rumjancev was minister of foreign affairs and maintained friendly relations with Napoleon Bonaparte. The latter, however, threatened Russia, and when he invaded, the Russian politician suffered a stroke, which caused his hearing to be impaired. Rumjancev had it made by having a great admiration for Napoleon. And Napoleon attacked Russia.

Canova was commissioned to make the work at the dawn of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, so much so that the sculptor himself wrote to Quatremère de Quincy on February 11, 1812: “The statue of Peace will be made: vengane the war; it will not be able to prevent it. But I fear that the general peace will not be made a statue for now. So it could be made, as I would raise it at my own expense!” Upon Nikolai Petrovič Rumyancev’s death, his collection was donated to the state and went on to form the first Russian Public Museum in 1831, initially in St. Petersburg, then, in 1861, transferred to Moscow. Krušëv, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of Ukrainian origin, decides in 1953 to transfer the sculpture from St. Petersburg to Kiev, to the Khanenko National Museum. There, it was all but forgotten: Ukraine rediscovered the great value of the work just under two decades ago, when Irina Artemieva, conservator of Venetian art at the Hermitage Museum, rediscovered a correspondence, preserved in the Manuscript Section of the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, between Antonio Canova and the ambassador from Vienna, who had brokered the commission. The rediscovery of the correspondence has made it possible to reconstruct the history and events related to the creation of the work.

The iconography of Peace recalls Nemesis, the Greek goddess of the “distribution of justice.” The serpent recalls Roman medals, where it was a symbol of war. The fact that the commemorative inscriptions are in Latin is the result of a negotiation between Canova and the ambassador from Vienna: the initial hypothesis of the Russian language was set aside in favor of Latin, a lingua franca and symbol of union among European nations, thus reinforcing the work’s message of peace.

“This sculpture,” comments Vittorio Sgarbi, “encapsulates a series of formidable intrigues of past and present. There is an admirer of peace, who asks for peace for himself, and he asks for it with Napoleon in mind, but as he asks for it Napoleon arrives at the gates of Russia. War brings only evil and violence on all sides, both for those who exercise it first and for those who exercise it as a reaction. So it is very melancholy to think that something is also happening against works of art as well as people. The Peace of Kiev is now on display in Florence, and here it temporarily awaits times of peace. Canova, the last great a rtist who closed the art of the West united everything, not divided it. Canova is a great conciliator of every conflict, every difference, and in the name of his Peace I ask you all to invoke it together on the plane of world spirit, that the m ond may be saved. To Dostoevsky’s phrase: ’beauty will save the world’ I have never fully believed: we cannot say that beauty saves the world, if the world does not save beauty, for the sake of humanity and civilization that art testifies to.”

“Art and culture will win against violence and the abomination of war,” stressed Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence. “In these troubled times we welcome to Palazzo Vecchio a strongly symbolic work. The Peace of Kiev , now hidden from view because of the war and who knows for how long still inaccessible, is evoked with its only existing copy in the Leo X room. It induces us to reflect on the extreme material fragility of art in the face of destructive forces but also on the power of the same that becomes form, me mory, a message of peace of unusual courage.”

“A few days after the presentation of Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth Estate, a second masterpiece of Italian art enters Palazzo Vecchio, the model of the so-called Peace of Kiev molded in plaster by Antonio Canova,” says Sergio Risaliti, director of the Novecento Museum in Florence. “Here past, present and future meet and intersect and art takes on the task of representing the destiny of humanity. Incredible how the works of two artists of such different culture and style, if not antithetical, can drop into the present and regenerate themselves in our eyes. Proof that great masterpieces transcend their era, even when they arise from the news, because they become spokesmen for universal values. Turning dav anti to the Fourth Estate , pausing to admire the classical forms of Peace , it is immediate to recall two fundamental principles of our constitution. The first which puts labor at the center, and the eleventh which repudiates war. It is not to be taken for granted that art and make itself such a sublime and engaging spokesman in our eyes and souls for such ideals and values. When this happens we recognize in the works of great artists lifeline anchors as well as warnings to act for the good of ’man and the progress of civilization. Looking at the immaculate white forms of the Peace of Kiev we cannot help but think of the blood that flows in Ukraine, the drama of refugees, the horrors perpetuated among civilians. And we cannot but think of the fate of so many artistic masterpieces put at risk by the destructive fury of armies. Canova’s Peace requires us to make sense of beauty by being bearers of fraternity and solidarity among peoples and people.”

Pictured is the plaster cast of the Peace of Kiev in Florence. Photo by Alessandra Cinquemani

Antonio Canova's plaster cast of the Peace of Kiev exhibited in Florence

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