CANOVA Four Tempos vol. IV is Luigi Spina’s photographic study of Antonio Canova’s plaster casts at the Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2024, it is the fourth and final volume of a project devoted to the sculptor’s preparatory works—the “imperfect form” that stands between conception in plaster and translation into marble.
Spina’s photographs attend to the casts as records of making rather than as secondary versions of finished sculpture. Pins, surface traces, unfinished passages, and the physical evidence of adjustment become part of the subject. The volume moves across a wide range of figures and states: from the youthful Daedalus and Icarus to Adonis crowned by Venus, which remained unfinished and was never translated into marble; from the tense, contrasting poses of Hector and Ajax to Venus emerging from her bath. This attention to process gives familiar classical ideals—harmony, proportion, perfection—a material and human counterpoint.
The book also turns toward Canova’s patrons. The little prince Heryk Lubominski appears as Cupid, while Princess Leopoldina Esterházy Liechtenstein is represented in another commissioned portrait. Their inclusion broadens the study from mythological narrative to the social circumstances in which sculpture was conceived and received. Vittorio Sgarbi contributes the text, while Spina’s photographic authorship supplies the project’s sustained visual inquiry.
For collectors of photography books concerned with sculpture, museum practice, and the life of objects, this volume is notable for the precision of its subject and the clarity of its editorial frame. Its 84 pages, hardcover format, and 24 × 30 cm scale give a focused conclusion to a four-part investigation, preserving attention on the casts’ surfaces, gestures, and latent transformations rather than treating them simply as illustrations of Canova’s marble masterpieces.
