Canova’s drawings at the Correr Museum

The Museo Correr in Venice preserves an important nucleus of Antonio Canova’s autograph drawings, which testify to the artist’s creative process from idea to work of art.

These drawings are displayed inside the Canova rooms of the Correr Museum in Venice, to which I am devoting a story in several installments.
This is the second post in the series 😉

Un disegno di Antonio Canova per la realizzazione delle Tre Grazie

The Canova drawings preserved at the Correr Museum are made with Antonio Canova’s two favorite techniques: pencil and India ink.

Canova used pencil if the idea he had in mind was still unclear and yet to be studied in all its parts; he used India ink, on the other hand, when the form only needed some slight adjustments and thus just before the actual realization.

Many sheets that can be admired in the Canova rooms refer to famous works such as The Graces, or to models that never became actual marbles, however.
The importance of these drawings lies not in the fact that the initial idea became a masterpiece, but in the fact that they demonstrate Canova’s great inventive ability and his skill in fixing with sharpness the form of an idea that was to become three-dimensional.

We should not forget that from the drawing one had to move on to the sketch in terracotta, wood or wax, so Antonio Canova’s process of creation involved progressive adjustments of which the drawing is the first stage.
Seeing them at the Correr is like entering Canova’s mind and imagining with him the making of a work of art.