The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Naked George Washington statue to finally make it to U.S.
Model created by Italian sculptor 200 years ago.
It is a statue of the father of our country that America has never seen: George Washington in the buff.
He is not wearing a velvet suit, as he does in the stonyfaced Gilbert Stuart portrait. He is not wearing a Continental Army uniform, as he does in the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Nor is he wearing a Roman toga, as he does in another statue. That Washington, naked from the waist up, offended Victorian-era sensibilities in the nation’s capital. A founding father’s pecs and abs were too much for the 1840s.
The naked Washington is a not-quite-200-year-old plaster statue by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova — a 30-inch preliminary model for a life-size image of Washington that was going to show him in a Roman soldier’s uniform (with the torso covered). The naked statue is coming to the United States for the first time for an exhibition called “Canova’s George Washington,” which is scheduled to open next year at the Frick Collection. A full-size plaster model will also make its American 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. Canova was celebrated while he was alive, with Goethe and Wordsworth in the chorus of admirers. Flaubert managed to plant a kiss on Canova’s “Cupid and Psyche” and declare, “I was kissing beauty itself.”
Canovian beauty was what North Carolina got when the General Assembly decided to honor Washington. This was soon after the War of 1812, when the still-young United States was celebrating its place among nations. Someone asked Thomas Jefferson who could produce a suitable statue. “There can be but one answer to this,” he responded. “Old Canove of Rome.”
Jefferson got Canova’s name wrong, but Canova got the commission. It was his only work that was destined for the United States. As Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s chief curator, observed, “A commission from America then, it was like a commission from Mars.”
Canova did the naked Washington in preparation for the final statue, which he sent to Raleigh 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 ver- sions of their subjects — in effect, sketches in plaster — as they thought through the process of turning cold, hard stone into hair, skin and soft-looking fabric.
“It is one of the four preliminary models, part of the preparatory work,” Salomon said, and it was practical, not prurient. “He always did a nude model of his sculptures so he could understand how the body worked under the drapery,” he said. “Absolutely standard practice. He would start with rough drawings and then move to three-dimensional plaster models such as this one.”
Salomon does not know who posed for the body. It was not Washington. The first president had been dead for 17 years by the time Canova went to work.