Museums: Marble for the Met

In the lofty Great Hall of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last week appeared a newly acquired, exquisitely graceful, 7-ft. white marble statue of the mythical Perseus victoriously displaying the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa. It was completed in 1808 by the neoclassical Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. In its first week atop its pedestal, it drew gasps of admiration from some. Others responded to its supersubtle softness and delicacy much as did the poet Keats when shown Canova’s half-nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister. Sniffed Keats: “Beautiful bad taste.”

Canova, one of the most celebrated sculptors of his day, known as “the new Phidias,” had carved an earlier Perseus for a Milanese nobleman at his atelier in Rome. It was inspired by the celebrated 1st century Roman marble of Apollo Belvedere, which had recently been carried off from the Vatican by invading French soldiers. Pope Pius VII liked the new Canova so much that the Roman authorities refused to grant an export permit, and it was bought for the Vatican where it now stands. (The Apollo was also returned.) A Polish countess, Valeria Tarnowska, then commissioned a second Perseus, which many consider even more finely modeled and technically expert than the first. The Polish countess paid 3,000 Italian gold sequins for it (about $120,000). Her heirs sold it in 1850, after her death, to a wealthy Austrian family. The Met, which bought it from the same family early this year in private negotiations, declined to discuss what effect two centuries of inflation had had on the price.