Up close and personal with Cork's Canova Casts in muscle: a question of power
‘Muscle’ at Crawford Art Gallery. Picture: Jed Niezgoda
Anna Furse’s first impressions of the Canova Casts in the Sculpture Gallery at the Crawford Art Gallery were not necessarily the most positive. It was 2018, the Crawford was hosting an Arts and Health conference, and Furse — a British theatre artist, writer and academic — was the keynote speaker. “I walked around the Sculpture Gallery on my coffee break,” she says. “It hadn’t been renovated yet. It was musty, and all these figures were kind of huddled together.”
The casts — Antonio Canova’s reproductions of sculptures from antiquity, such as Adonis, Bathing Venus and the Belvedere Torso — were commissioned by Pope Pius VII as a gift for the Prince Regent of England, later King George IV, and were presented to the city of Cork in November 1818. When Furse came upon them, 200 years later, “they looked like neglected children".
