Roman School, late 18th Century

The present painting portrays the great Italian Neo-Classical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) at work in his studio, surrounded by several of his famous works.  The statue of Amorino shown at center on the pedestal is either the one done in 1789, commissioned by John Campbell, later Baron Cawdor, and now in Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire or, perhaps more likely given the modelling of the hair, the one for John David La Touche, done in 1792, and now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.  The statue of Psyche seen at the right is either the one done for Henry Blundell (1790-93) and still with his descendants, or a second version done in circa 1795 that is now in the Kunsthalle, Bremen.  The funerary monument depicted in the background is that of the Tomb of Clement XIII for St. Peter's, Rome (1783-92).  Though the portrait depicts Canova with some of the important commissions he would have been working on in the late 1780s and early 1790s, it is unlikely that all these sculptures would have been in Canova's studio simultaneously. 

Canova was portrayed by no less that forty other artists in his lifetime, a mark of the high esteem in which he was held.  Though as yet unidentified, the artist of this portrait may have been one of the many foreign painters studying in Rome at that time, and it has been suggested that it may be by an English, Irish or perhaps even German painter.  An untraced portrait by the Mantuan painter Domenico Maria Conti Bazzanti (circa 1740-1818) is listed in Hugh Honour's article "A List of Artists Who Portrayed Canova," in Studi in Onore di Elena Bassi, Venice 1998, p. 158, no. 3.