George Washington Dons His Roman Garb
The Frick Collection is dedicating an exhibition to Antonio Canova’s 1821 statue of George Washington in Roman garb (23 May-23 September). Commissioned for the State House in Raleigh, North Carolina, the statue was destroyed in a fire in the 1830s. Until now the full-sized preparatory plaster model had never left Italy. “Washington was shown as a modern Cincinnatus, so the overarching concept of the commission was the important idea of the peaceful surrender of power from one elected president to another,†explains the show’s curator Xavier Salomon.
