Twelve Newly Recovered Canova Casts at Pinacoteca di Brera

Face to Face with Twelve Recently Recovered Canova Plaster Casts

Acquired and restored by Banca Ifis, the works are on display for one year at the Pinacoteca di Brera in dialogue with other masterpieces by the Neoclassical master held in the museum.

Ada Masoero for Il Giornale dell'Arte

There’s Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, Napoleon’s mother, and his beautiful sisters: Paolina, married in Rome to Prince Borghese; Caroline, married to Joachim Murat, a Napoleonic general and later King of Naples; and Elisa Baciocchi, Princess of Lucca and Piombino and later Grand Duchess of Tuscany. All are depicted in plaster busts taken from marble originals by Antonio Canova (1757–1822), which, along with busts of his most famous works such as the Venere Italica, Clio-Calliope, Musa Erato, Tersicore, and the allegorical figure of Peace, form a group of twelve Canova plasters recently rediscovered at Villa Canal alla Gherla (Treviso), a property belonging to descendants of the sculptor.

Acquired and restored by Banca Ifis through Ifis Art—the art initiative launched by the bank’s president Ernesto Fürstenberg Fassio—the plasters were previously exhibited only at the 2023 exhibition Antonio Canova e il Neoclassicismo a Lucca, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, and at the 2024 edition of Arte in Nuvola in Rome. They now arrive in Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera, where they will remain on view for a year, until May 17, 2026.

Installed in visual dialogue with Canova’s colossal plaster Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker in Gallery XV—whose bronze version is in Brera’s courtyard—the 12 rediscovered plasters are displayed alongside the magnificent marble head of the Vestale (Vestale, 1818), part of Brera’s own collection. Although the work had long been on deposit at Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM), a municipal museum where it became an iconic image, it has now returned to Brera, a state museum. The works are on display in Gallery I as part of a newly reconfigured display that both evokes the Neoclassical ideal of beauty cultivated at the beginning of the 19th century—when the Pinacoteca itself was founded—and pays tribute to Giuseppe Bossi, the artist and secretary of the Brera Academy who played a key role in building the museum’s permanent collections.

Regarding the return of the Vestale to Brera, museum director Angelo Crespi has indicated that the civic collections will be more than compensated for the loss with a new, important long-term loan to be announced in the coming months.

Ten of the rediscovered busts, created between 1807 and 1818 and measuring between 50 and 60 centimeters in height, are casts taken from Canova’s marble originals—a common practice in his studio. Canova personally oversaw the quality and the limited number of these plasters, which were intended to disseminate and perpetuate his fame. The other two (Paris and Beatrice, 1813) are original models for future marble sculptures, as confirmed by the presence of repères—metal studs that guided stonecutters in transferring points from the plaster to the marble.

As for the future of the plaster casts, which are currently on loan from Banca Ifis and on view at the Pinacoteca for a year, their next destination has not yet been decided. They could remain at Brera on deposit, be featured in traveling exhibitions, or be displayed by the bank itself, whose president has shown great interest in making the artworks publicly accessible.

Also on view—currently in a temporary display case, while a grand and permanent one is being completed by Goppion—is a true jewel of Neoclassical culture: the “portable museum” or “traveling gallery” of Giovanni Battista Sommariva (1757–1826). A cultured and immensely wealthy politician (later fallen from grace), close friend of Giuseppe Bossi and avid collector of Canova’s work, Sommariva owned five major marbles and numerous plasters, which were distributed among his homes in Milan, Paris, and Tremezzo on Lake Como. The latter is now the celebrated Villa Carlotta, where Canova’s Palamedes (marble), Musa Tersicore (plaster), and a replica of the Penitent Magdalene still reside.

Unwilling to be separated from his collection of paintings—works by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffmann, Andrea Appiani, Francesco Hayez, and others—Sommariva had them reproduced in miniature enamel paintings by the best miniaturists of the time between 1810 and 1823, so he could carry (and show) them wherever he went. The result was a refined micro-museum, later donated in 1873 to the Pinacoteca di Brera by his daughter-in-law Emilia Sommariva Seillière (1801–1888). Today, it offers a glimpse into the refined collecting tastes of the era, perfectly in tune with Antonio Canova’s legacy.