Galatea

Signed on the base: ‘S. Canevari’.

Exhibitions: Rome, Sindacato Interprovinciale Fascista di Belle Arti, 1932.

Bibliography: Terza Mostra del Sindacato Regionale Fascista Belle Arti del Lazio, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1 March – 30 April 1932), Rome, Edizioni Pinci, p. 17, no. 9.

Galatea, a silver sculpture with a marble base, was exhibited in the important retrospective dedicated to Silvio Canevari as part of the exhibition of the Regional Fascist Fine Arts Union of Lazio in 1932, shortly after his untimely death at the age of only thirty-eight. Thirty-three works summarising his short but intense career were collected in the second room of the Roman exhibition, celebrated in the catalogue for his “tenacious, silent work” and his intimate conviction that “only in balance was truth”[1]. Galatea, one of the Nereids, a sea nymph daughter of Nereus and Doris, stands out for her delicacy and sinuosity, in her silvery body curled up on the dolphin, which, according to Renaissance iconography, carried her in triumph through the waves of the Sicilian sea, amidst cupids and tritons. It is precisely Raphael’s 1512 fresco with the Triumph of Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome that probably inspired Canevari, especially for the handling of the body volumes of Michelangelo’s ascendancy and for the ample movement of the mantle inflated by the wind: “the study of the most luminous Italian tradition”[2].

The graceful posture of the nymph, gently reclining on the back of the dolphin that welcomes her with its fin curved upwards as it rides stylised waves, is exactly reminiscent of Ovid’s verses in the Metamorphoses, by the Cyclops Polyphemus in love with her: “O Galatea, whiter than the snowy petal of the privet […], more slender than the lofty alder, softer than the swan’s feathers […], but still: more impetuous than the river, more superb than the praised peacock.”[3] A precious sculpture that distances itself from Canevari’s best known and canonical production, that of athletes and heroes, and is instead intimately connected with the classical Greek and Roman world, to which the sculptor is particularly attached, as is also shown by the studies carried out by Hildegard Schmidt that relate Canevari’s sculpture to the idea of classicism disseminated by Winckelmann in the 18th century[4].

In the same retrospective, another Galatea also appeared, this time in the form of a bronze-patinated plaster medallion, in which the Nereid maintains the same pose of muscular legs crossed over the dolphin’s head, her hands clasped in a measured gesture in front of her chest, her face reclining on her left shoulder and her veil fluttering in the background. This is a sketch for one of the twelve bronze bas-reliefs executed by Canevari in 1922 for the interior of the Conteverde steamer, decorated in collaboration with Studio Coppedè. The correspondence of the subject leads us to hypothesise that the silver sculpture may also date back to the same years, 1922-1923, at the height of the blossoming of his poetics, after the years of artistic retirement, when he expressed himself through an “intimate and vivid unity of meaning and form, which leave no doubt as to the artist’s skill”[5].

Elena Lago

[1] Mostra retrospettiva dello scultore Silvio Canevari, in Terza Mostra del Sindacato Regionale Fascista Belle Arti del Lazio, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1 March – 30 April 1932), Rome, Edizioni Pinci, p. 16.

[2] A. Dazzi, G.. Mentessi, M. Piacentini, F. Fedele, Relazione a S.E. il Ministro della pubblica istruzione della commissione per la revisione dei lavori dei pensionati artistici nazionali, in “Bollettino ufficiale del Ministero dell’Istruzione pubblica”, L, 18, 1923, p. 2287.

[3] Ovid, Metamorphoses, Italian translation by P. Bernardini Marzolla, Einaudi, Turin, 1994, pp. 541-542.

[4] H. Schmidt, Silvio Canevari, in Il corpo in corpo, exhibition catalogue edited by B. Mantura, Rome, De Luca edizioni d’arte, 1990.

[5] A. Dazzi, G.. Mentessi, M. Piacentini, F. Fedele, Relazione a S.E. il Ministro della pubblica istruzione della commissione per la revisione dei lavori dei pensionati artistici nazionali, in “Bollettino ufficiale del Ministero dell’Istruzione pubblica”, L, 18, 1923, p. 2287.