CANOVA Four Tempos vol. I, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2020, places Antonio Canova’s plaster models at the centre of a photographic study by Luigi Spina. These objects occupy a crucial but often overlooked position in the sculptor’s method: they stand between the preliminary design and the finished marble, preserving the moment when an idea becomes materially testable. Plaster is unfinished, yet it already contains the force and potential of the sculpture to come.
Spina photographs the models in the gipsothèque at Possagno, working through close views and sequences rather than treating them as merely preparatory documents. The small bronze nails known as repères—points used to guide the transfer from plaster to marble—become visual markers within this new atlas. Faces, gestures, hair, and drapery emerge as changing territories; the camera moves across surfaces where light meets a pliable, vulnerable material.
Time gives the volume its organising principle. The “four tempos” refer not simply to a formal division, but to the temporal structure of Canova’s creative and productive process: the study that comes before, the completed work that follows, and plaster as the charged interval between them. Spina’s solitary attention to these forms makes that interval perceptible, turning technical evidence into a sustained meditation on making, transformation, and the persistence of touch.
At 84 pages and in a 24 × 30 cm format, the book offers a concentrated encounter with a little-known stage in one of Neoclassicism’s defining practices. Its importance for collectors lies in the precision of its subject and in the way photography reopens sculpture as an experience of surface, scale, and duration. Rather than illustrating Canova from a distance, this volume asks the reader to look closely at the fragile forms from which the finished works emerged.
