Erotic Spirituality and the Catholic Revival in Napoleonic Paris: The Curious History of Antonio Canova’s Penitent Magdalen

Antonio Canova’s Penitent Magdalen (fig. 1) is arguably one of the least studied of all the sculptor’s works in marble. It is also one of the most difficult to position in the thematic and stylistic progression of his career. All surveys of Canova’s oeuvre mention the statue and give brief details about the commission, but come up short when attempting to describe Mary Magdalen aesthetically or to reconstruct its historical context. Part of the reason for the dearth of scholarly interest may be Canova’s own apparent indifference. He seems not to have valued it and rarely returned to religious themes until the last years of his life, when he was designing and building the great mortuary Tempio in Possagno, his home town in the Dolomite Mountains north of Venice.¹ Indeed, his major religious work before the Restoration in 1814 was not a sculpture but a painting, the Pietà, an enormous canvas executed in 1799 that eventually found its way to the high altar of the church in Possagno.²

Why, then, was Penitent Magdalen so wildly popular in Napoleonic Paris? From 1802 until 1816, a score of works by the “modern Phidias” were exhibited in the French capital—some at the Salon and others privately—above all those executed for Empress Josephine’s Canova gallery at the château de Malmaison—but none achieved the celebrity afforded the Magdalen. Its impact on French painting of the Napoleonic and Restoration

Figure 1.

Antonio Canova, Penitent Magdalen, marble, 1796. Genoa: Museo Agostiniano.

eras is universally acknowledged, and was especially important for painters such as Pierre-Narcisse Guérin and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, among others. I shall attempt to explain the curious history of Canova’s Penitent Magdalen in Napoleonic Paris by examining briefly the social, political, spiritual, and aesthetic contexts into which it was introduced in about 1805. Ultimately, my goal is to call attention to what I believe is a major lacuna in our knowledge of the art of the Romantic era; namely, what role did contemporary Italian art play in the genesis and development of French Romanticism?

At first glance, the Penitent Magdalen seems an unprepossessing work of sculpture. Housed today in the Museo Agostiniano in the under-visited city of Genoa, it is rarely seen even by art historians and other determined devotees of Canova’s art. In its present setting, it is badly lit and poorly preserved. A yellowish coating on the surface, the result of a misguided restoration in the late nineteenth century, casts a jaundiced pall over the figure. The Magdalen’s small scale and slumped, melancholic posture seem more a product of her unhappy present than a testimony to her past glories. Standing before it, considerable powers of imagination, coupled with intensive research, are needed to recover its exalted place in the history of early nineteenth-century European art. There can be little question, however, that its forlorn sentimentality and corporeal vulnerability gave it considerable appeal to French viewers in Napoleonic Paris.

Penitent Magdalen was Canova’s first independent marble statue of a religious subject. The artist’s earlier forays into the realm of the sacred were limited to tomb imagery, most notably the papal tombs of Clement XIII and Clement XIV executed between 1783 and 1792.³ Their tremendous critical success established the sculptor’s international reputation. A Venetian prelate resident in Rome, monsignor Giuseppe Priuli, commissioned Mary Magdalene in 1796. Canova likely accepted the task due to his connections to the Venetian network active in the papal capital and for pride in his native Serene Republic, since there is little indication he was interested in the subject matter per se. The precise nature of the artist’s ties to Priuli is unclear, but they moved in the same circles in Rome and both were likely friends of Carlo Rezzonico (1724–99), the Venetian cardinal who awarded Canova the commission for his papal uncle Clement XIII’s tomb in Saint Peter’s...