Kat Käpi 🏳️🕉️😷

One of the greatest sculptors of all time was born 269 years ago today, on November 1, 1757. His name was Antonio Canova, and this is Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, a marble sculpture he carved between 1787 and 1793. It depicts the most tender moment of an ancient love story: in the myth, Psyche was warned never to open a certain jar, but she couldn’t resist, and fell into a sleep so deep it was like death. Cupid flies down to find her, and here he holds her in his arms, about to wake her with a kiss, while she reaches up to draw him closer. Part of the magic lies in how Canova worked with light: even in his first clay sketches he studied how light would fall across his figures, and he poured all his skill into the final stage of the work, which he called the “last hand.” He would smooth and polish the stone for weeks, often working by candlelight to see every curve, and rub a thin mixture of wax into the skin to take away the cold shine of the marble and make it glow softly, like real flesh. He was born in the small village of Possagno and raised by a grandfather who was a stonemason, which is how he came to be carving marble before he was even ten. He spent his whole life trying to make stone breathe, and it’s no surprise that Lord Byron once wrote that Canova could create what nature could, but would not...