07/08/2007. Verona: Antonio Canova Museum.

I don’t have too much to say about this museum except for that I really enjoyed it much more than I expected to. I thought I was just going to go see these mock-ups of famous sculptures and that I wouldn’t be much impressed by them. Which is how I did feel at first. I didn’t really see what was so important about these sculptures made out of gesso. Then I got into a different room that was tiny sculptures that were the first models for the bigger ones. They were mostly made out of terracotta and they were the most beautiful things in that whole building. I understand how most people would think that the grandeur of the gesso sculptures are the works to spend the most time looking at. But I could have spent hours examining those small terracotta forms. They were so much about the process and you could tell this because they were much smaller and inherently more simplistic. And yet, at the same time they had this amazing detail. So much so that it was like you could really imagine the hand of the artist forming the terracotta and making all the marking that were on it. One could look at those small sculptures and making them didn’t seem that unrealistic. I think the larger sculptures are more intimidating to non-artists and artists alike that the small ones made the process seem not all that impossible.

From looking at those sculptures I realized that the whole museum was actually pretty amazing. It is a whole museum that is dedicated to the process of art, the process that goes into that final product. Which is something you don’t really see in most museums. Most are dedicated solely to the final product, this one piece of art that is on display for all the gawk at. The average person is not going to spend much time thinking about how the artist created the work of art. I think that was the unique thing about this museum and something that I did not immediately appreciate but after spending some time in there, I was in awe.