Theseus and the Minotaur (sculpture)

Theseus and the Minotaur is a 1781–1782 white marble sculpture by Antonio Canova, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which bought it in 1962.^[1]

Background and commission

The work was commissioned by Girolamo Zulian, Venetian ambassador to Rome and one of Canova's patrons, who also gave him the marble block for it; it is one of his earliest works after settling in Rome.^[2] Zulian left the choice of subject up to Canova, to whom Canova's friend Gavin Hamilton suggested Theseus just after killing the Minotaur from Ovid's Metamorphoses.^[3]

Description

The mythological subject is drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which recounts the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who, with the help of Ariadne, succeeded in penetrating the labyrinth of Knossos and killing the Minotaur, a monstrous creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Rather than representing the bloody moment of combat — as a Baroque sculptor such as Bernini might have done, with dynamic, violent energy — Canova, in keeping with Neoclassical poetics, chose to immortalise the moment immediately following the conclusion of the fight. Theseus is shown seated atop the monster he has just killed, like a hunter resting on his prey; the Minotaur lies on a rock in an inverted "S" position.^[3]

Theseus is depicted in a state of peace and tranquillity — even weariness — as conveyed by his relaxed, uncontracted body. His bearing is wholly different from the anger and fury that drove him to kill the Minotaur. He gazes down upon the vanquished monster with what appears to be pity, as if the nobility of his soul precludes any lingering hatred or resentment towards his enemy. The subject is also intended as an Enlightenment allegory of reason triumphing over irrationality.^[4]

The work's physical and spiritual tranquillity, and Theseus' anatomy in particular, directly refer to the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" which contemporary art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann held to be the unique characteristic of Hellenistic art.^[5] So great is its debt to that era of art that its first viewers initially thought it to be a copy of a Greek original and were shocked to discover it was a contemporary work.^[6] The work was widely disseminated via an engraving by Raffaello Sanzio Morghen and helped establish Canova's reputation.

Provenance

By the time the sculpture was completed, Zulian had left Rome for Constantinople and released the work to Canova, who sold it to the Austrian collector Count Moritz von Fries, who took it to Vienna. It was next acquired sometime before 1822 by Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, who installed it in his London residence of Londonderry House, most likely sometime in the 1820s. It remained there until that house's contents were sold just before its demolition in the 1960s, at which time it was acquired by its present owner for £3,000, a third of which was provided by the National Art-Collections Fund.^[7]

References