The Living Death of Antiquity by William Fitzgerald;

Author:William Fitzgerald; [Fitzgerald, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192646224
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

The ancient iconography of the Graces has its allegorical rationale. In Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1645),79 still highly influential in Canova’s time, the Graces come under the category of Amicitia (friendship), playing with several meanings of the word Grazia: grace, a favour, and gratitude. Ripa is leaning on the Younger Seneca’s explication of why the Graces are three, and why they are represented by artists as they are (Seneca, De Beneficiis 1.3.2–1.4.6). The figures, Seneca explains, embrace each other because one kindness gives birth to another, and friends must always be mutually grateful; and they are naked and virginal because a favour should always be sincere and disinterested.80 The disposition of the three figures, with one turned away from us and the other two facing us, has its own meaning. Echoing Seneca, Vergil’s late-antique commentator Servius (on Aeneid 1.720) explains that the law of gratia (‘favour') is that for one part that goes out two parts return.81 But this combination of going and returning acquires erotic significance in the ancient configuration of the figures, since the image of three naked females affords both front and back views, and in whatever proportion is preferred, depending on the direction of approach.

Canova’s more circular composition, while bearing traces of the traditional line-up, stresses the relation of exchange between the three Graces rather than contrasting orientations to the viewer.82 Instead of dramatizing the exchange between what comes towards us and what leaves us, Canova composed a circulation that is closed off from the viewer. The heads of the pair to our left are tilted together, or, rather, the Grace on the left seems to be lightly pressing the cheek of the middle Grace to nestle forehead against cheek. The third figure, her hand skirting the middle figure’s breast, looks up at the other two in—admiration? longing? jealousy? If in itself this affectionate threesome suggests a love triangle, Canova seems to raise that possibility only to dismiss it. Ugo Foscolo’s poem Le Tre Grazie, inspired by Canova’s group, made the Graces representative of the social emotions through which the competitive violence of the instincts is restrained. Canova’s group manages to be both passionate and chaste, dramatic and impersonal.

If we approach the group from the front, the composition is clear (see Fig. 3.1). As Fred Licht eloquently puts it: ‘The conjunction of elbow and looped scarf at the centre of the group discreetly establishes a visual pivot that gathers the ascending rhythm of legs and hips, radiating them in the expansive bouquet of heads that crowns the group.’83 But we are also invited to circumambulate the group and admire the play of arms, substituting for a dramatic relationship between the figures a kaleidoscopic succession of compositions, which would have been facilitated by the revolving platform in the Temple of the Graces at Woburn (see Fig. 3.2). This is an anti-Laocoon, in which the serpentine twining of the arms and the looping of the exquisitely carved drapery are benign rather than tormented, expressing the harmonious threesomeness of the group.

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