It is a statue of the US’ founding father that the nation has never seen: George Washington in the buff.
The naked Washington is a not-quite-200-year-old plaster statue by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova — a 76cm preliminary model for a life-size image of Washington that was going to show him in a Roman soldier’s uniform.
The naked statue is going to the US for the first time for an exhibition, which is scheduled to open next year at the Frick Collection in New York.
A full-size plaster model is also make its US debut, along with sketches and drawings, all lent by the Museo Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy.
The museum is a shrine to Canova, the foremost neoclassical sculptor of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The North Carolina General Assembly decided to honor Washington soon after the War of 1812. Someone asked former US president Thomas Jefferson who could produce a suitable statue.
“There can be but one answer to this. Old Canove of Rome,” he reportedly said.
Jefferson got Canova’s name wrong, but Canova got the commission. It was his only work that was destined for the US.
“A commission from America then, it was like a commission from Mars,” Frick chief curator Xavier Salomon said.
Canova did the naked Washington in preparation for the final statue, which he sent to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1821. The completed statue sat in the state’s House until it was ruined in a fire in 1831. A replica was installed in 1970.
As a preliminary piece, the naked Washington never left Canova’s studio in Italy. Salomon said North Carolinians almost certainly had not known about it, even though artists often did naked versions of their subjects — in effect, sketches in plaster.
“It is one of the four preliminary models, part of the preparatory work,” Salomon said, and it was practical, not prurient.
Salomon does not know who posed for the body.
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