Canova in Bologna. A regenerating exhibition at the Alma Mater's art venue.

A flight! A glittering flight accomplished by a wise bee responding to the ideal figure of an affable and cultured princess as is Maria Luisa Pacelli, director of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. An exploration over a phenomenon that becomes more and more interesting, even to the point of enthusiasm for art, as the visitor proceeds in the assumption of the themes and works of a singular and beautiful exhibition concerning the Canovian imbrication of learned Bologna in the lively auras of a high and sublime neoclassicism.

What was Bologna like while Girondins and Jacobins were disputing the French Revolution and then while the Corsican Buonaparte stripped Italy of every possible good? It was a city of studies and features that enjoyed the long secular peace of the Church State and could boast cultural presences of the highest prestige: the advanced Institute of Sciences founded in 1711 by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, which (next to the Alma Mater Studiorum) stood at the head of research in every field of knowledge; the University itself; the Philharmonic Academy; the Academy of Arts, alive within the Clementine Academy that cared for letters, poetry, history, archaeology, architecture; all in the “spirit of enlightenment” as Francesca Lui recalls in an excellent catalog essay. In Bologna taught harmonies Father Giovanni Battista Martini “gran musagete” and teacher of Mozart; here the famous man of letters Pietro Giordani, Leopardi’s malleader, carried out a sovereign task in the humanities and in the very taste of society, as did Francesco Algarotti in the arts of drawing with profound culture; painters like Ubaldo Gandolfi worked here, sculptors like Carlo Bianconi and Giacomo Rossi; among engravers Mauro Tesi and then Francesco Rosaspina, architects like Angelo Venturoli and Giovanni Battista Martinetti. All to be reevaluated today, and powerfully, with knowledge and conscience.

Why this introduction? Because it opens up a full universe of study and activity in the last quarter of the 18th century in a city on a European level. For English, Irish and French intellectuals came and stayed here in dense numbers, and so did figurative artists in search of examples, models and inspiration. Touching and perfectly significant was the gesture of the Irish painter James Barry, who wished to leave his painting Philoctetes Wounded as a gift to the City after being named an Academician of Honor at the Clementina (1771): a canvas soon famous as an early and supreme example of neoclassicism, that is, endowed with monumentality, ancient literary evocation, and strong moral content. In a general sense Bologna was an ethical center of excellent standing to accommodate what would be, and became, the living prodigy of the new classicism.

Canova stayed in Bologna six times certainly and even more if one considers the stages of his national and international travels. The first time at the age of 22 in 1779 on his way to Rome to collect the immense legacy of the Eternal City and to be welcomed as the new dawn of art in the Palazzo Venezia by the direct heirs of his beloved Venetian pope, Carlo Rezzonico, namely Clement XIII. The good fortune of possessing his autograph travel notebooks, which appear in the exhibition, certifies us of his careful census of the works in Bologna, where, in addition to the drawings, he jotted down his appraisals and often admiring amazement: as for the anatomies of the Istituto delle Scienze, for Lombardi’s Lamentation, for the altarpieces by Carracci, Reni, Cavedone, Pasinelli and Domenichino; and for that ceiling of the Sampieri house, by Guercino, of which he writes “I do not believe that a mortal can do more in fresco.” This extensive and rich stage (also in terms of music and food) provided him with an intimate bond with the city, a decisive lesson in artistic vitality and several sincere friendships that he always renewed.

The exhibition, curated by the young and fervent scholar Alessio Costarelli, covers all the visits of the man who became “sculpture itself” for the whole of Europe in Felsina felix, and all the fervent relationships that marked those ties in a crescendo of discoveries on documents, gifts, courtesies of Bolognese ladies, on the literary panegyrics, on the admirable sculptures present, all the way to the overwhelming gratitude of the Genius who brought back for Bologna and Cento from the Napoleonic robberies some of the greatest masterpieces, which mark for the visitor an extreme tuning fork of heartfelt and grateful enthusiasm. The very arrangement of the exhibition, in its layout, is happily inviting: the dilated basement and ultra-modern “open space,” perfectly illuminated with attractive and purposeful dosages, is articulated in a varied and accommodating itinerary that poses at every step the ease of contemplation, of documentary reading, of roundabout enjoyment of the all-rounds, of accompaniment through charts (a grand one on the peregrinating vicissitudes of the works under examination), and finally, after the unforgettable picture gallery of pictorial masterpieces returned from Paris and tributing to the soul of Canova, leads to the recreated computer reconstruction of the Church of Santo Spirito where, in 1816, the exhibition of the returned paintings was held.

It is an exhibition that offers an unexpected glimpse into a little-known but highly intense bond between the great Antonio and the City that loved him to the fullest. What is more, Bologna can now boast of actually possessing a marble by Canova in the slender sweet nude of the Apollino in the Civic Museums, thanks to the meritorious discovery of Antonella Mampieri, a true master on the “Felsina sculptor.”

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