aterially injured his health, but
he rallied again on his return to Rome. Towards the latter end of the
year he paid his annual visit to the place of his birth, when he
experienced a relapse. He proceeded to Venice, and expired there on the
13th of October 1822, at the age of nearly sixty-five. His disease was
one which had affected him from an early age, caused by the continual
use of carving-tools, producing a depression of the ribs. The most
distinguished funeral honours were paid to his remains, which were
deposited in the temple at Passagno on the 25th of the same month.

Canova, in a certain sense, renovated the art of sculpture in Italy, and
brought it back to that standard from which it had declined when the
sense both of classical beauty and moderation, and of Titanic invention
and human or superhuman energy as embodied by the unexampled genius of
Michelangelo, had succumbed to the overloaded and flabby mannerisms of
the 17th and 18th centuries. His finishing was refined, and he had a
special method of giving a mellow and soft appearance to the marble. He
formed his models of the same size as the work was intended to be. The
prominent defect of Canova's attractive and highly trained art is that
which may be summed up in the word artificiality,--that quality, so
characteristic of the modern mind, which seizes upon certain properties
of conception and execution in the art of the past, and upon certain
types of beauty or emotion in life, and makes a compound of the
two--regulating both by the standard of taste prevalent in contemporary
"high society," a standard which, referring to cultivation and
refinement as its higher term, declines towards fashion as the lower. Of
his moral character a generous and unwearied benevolence formed the most
prominent feature. The greater part of the vast fortune realized by his
works was distributed in acts of this description. He established prizes
for artists and endowed all the academies of Rome. The aged and
unfortunate were also the objects of his peculiar solicitude. His titles
were numerous. He was enrolled amongst the nobility of several states,
decorated with various orders of knighthood, and associated in the
highest professional honours.

See the _Life of Canova_ by Memes; that by Missirini; the _Biografia_
by the Count Cicognara; _Canova et ses ouvrages_, by Quatremere de
Quincy (1834); _Opere scelte di Antonio Canova_, by Anzelmi (Naples,
1842); _Canova_, by