Marble Figure of a Dancing Girl, After Canova

After Antonio Canova (Possagno, 1757–1822, Venice)
Dancing Girl with her Finger on her Chin
Italian, 19th century
Marble, 83 cm. / 32 5/8 ins high

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, West of England

Antonio Canova is regarded as the greatest Neoclassical sculptor and, in his day, he was probably the most famous artist in Europe. Canova’s oeuvre was deeply affected by his study of antique sculpture, yet his uniquely eroticised mythology and extreme fineness of carving and finish were to influence a whole generation of artists.

The present figure of a Dancing Girl with Her Finger on Her Chin is a fine nineteenth-century marble copy of the model Canova created in plaster in 1809 (Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova, Possagno), which was commissioned in marble for the Italian banker Domenico Manzoni di Forli and is now in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome.

In the present marble, the quality of the carving is evident in the typically soft, Canova-esque facial features and the delicate rendering of her right finger lightly touching her chin. There is also fine attention-to-detail in the carving of the twisting locks of hair, the wreath of flowers around her left wrist, the cymbals dangling on the tree root, and the finely rendered and complex folds of drapery on the classical tunic, which are characteristic of a highly-skilled Italian workshop operating in the mid-nineteenth century.

For a nineteenth-century copy of the Dancing Girl of similar proportions, albeit with coarser rendering of the drapery and other details (the cymbals at the back, for instance, are missing), see the figure from the Tadolini workshop, Rome, dated 1872 (Sotheby’s, London, 14 Dec 2022, lot 23, £16,380 incl. fees).[1]

[1] For images, see Sotheby’s website: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/19th-20th-century-sculpture-3/dancer