Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
Antonio Canova, the most important sculptor of Classicism, stayed repeatedly in Vienna and maintained an intensive relationship both with the imperial family and with the institutions and their representatives in the city. The article traces these relationships and presences in chronological order by discussing the works commissioned for Vienna by the sculptor in their genesis, but also the relationships forged during his visits to the city, some of which resulted in new commissions. Against the background of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, the sculptor’s efforts to make himself independent of patrons and of the courts, which were new in terms of the sociology of art, become clear. This is also manifested in the equally novel phenomenon of the artist’s own recontextualization of his works, for he repeatedly had to adapt them to changing political constellations and thus to new locations. The focus of the article is then Canova’s main work in Vienna, the Christinen-Grabmal – also a product of such a recontextualization – in relation to which it is problematized here for the first time whether the current installation is actually ‘correct’ in the sense of the intended overall concept. The article concludes with Canova’s Theseus and Centaur Group, which bears witness like no other work of the time to how such recontextualizations generated meaning or even neutralized it in the end.