At the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, the sculptor Antonio Canova was considered the most famous artist in the world. His works, such as Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–93) and Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–6), were the highpoint of Neoclassicism and proof of the continuing potency of the Classical tradition, especially when a drop of Baroque drama was added. Here was an artist who, to his contemporaries, combined the lineage of both Phidias and Bernini and had the skills to make marble equally adamantine and gravity-defying. When the influential art theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann called for artists to follow the example of Graeco-Roman art and imbue their works with ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’, Canova showed that such a stricture need not be stultifying.

In the battle of styles, Neoclassicism lost out to Romanticism and has never fully recovered its status: individuality, expression and feeling have trumped mythology and the concept of ideal beauty. Consequently, Neoclassicism’s great names have suffered too; not many today would put Canova’s contemporaries Anton Raphael Mengs and John Flaxman in the first rank, but that is nevertheless where they once stood. Although Canova was known to his peers as il divino, a few decades later John Ruskin would proclaim that ‘the admiration of Canova I hold to be one of the most deadly symptoms in the civilisation of the upper classes in the present century’. Canova’s fall from grace – from an example to be admired and emulated to artistic dead end – was jolting.

There is no popular biography of this sculptor who not only lived through revolutionary times but sculpted and met some of its leading actors. Livio Pestilli’s book does not seek to fill this gap but rather looks in detail at assorted aspects of Canova’s practice, from his critical reception to