Portrait of Antonio Canova

In 1806 Antonio Canova was famous across Europe, and in his Roman studio he was carving a marble of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister and the wife of Prince Camillo Borghese, reclining as the goddess Venus. That statue is now in this same gallery. Gaspare Landi, a painter from Piacenza and a close friend, shows the man behind it with none of that grandeur. Canova wears an ordinary dark coat and a loosely knotted white cravat. He has no wig, so his thin grey hair stands up around his head. His lips are slightly parted, as if he were about to speak, and the gallery calls it a speaking portrait. In the lower left corner Landi signed it and noted that he painted his friend in Rome. A second version of the same size, also dated 1806, belongs to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.