Hebe

The itinerary of the Forlì Civic Art Gallery within the monumental complex of San Domenico ends in a small room designed to house the Canova sculpture of ‘Hebe’, the goddess ‘with beautiful ankles’. The Forlì statue is the fourth and last version of the fortunate iconography, all of Canova’s invention, of the young cupbearer of the Olympian gods. A personification of the motif, already fully Romantic, of youth escaping and a prototype of the statues of the ‘aerial genre’, with its dynamic of the figure in flight and the balanced compositional balance of the pose of the arms, it is able to surprise the eye from any point of view. The young woman is fixed as if in the act of landing, with her dress completely swollen by the air, and here Canova, as Pindemonte observed, succeeded in sculpting ‘the steps’. The Forlì version of this figure from the ancient myth is striking for the successful gilded details of the necklace and the ribbon that holds the hair, precious details that add to the cup and jug in gilded metal. In the Forlì ‘Hebe’, the play of balanced contrasts between naked parts and portions completely enveloped by the flowing robe and the skill achieved by Canova, famous for the painterly quality of his sculpting, in transforming hard marble into soft flesh is fascinating.