A Revealing Statue of Washington Arrives, but Not Its Champion
Naked George arrived in New York on schedule.
The Italian woman who played a big role in arranging for Naked George to look stately and noble on this side of the Atlantic — specifically, in the Frick Collection, on Fifth Avenue — did not.
Naked George — though that is not its official name — is a 200-year-old plaster statue of the first president in the buff.
The woman is Franca Coin, the president of a small museum in Italy that owns the statue.
Xavier F.
Salomon, the Frick's chief curator, declared flatly: "This never would have happened without her.".
"This" is an exhibition that opened at the Frick last week, a case study of how the sculptor Antonio Canova worked.
"Naked George," a term coined by a friend of Ms.
Coin's, was one of four smallish plaster models that Canova made in preparation for a larger-than-life marble statue.
But Ms.
Coin remained in Italy, missing the opening of the exhibition, which brought the four models and a larger plaster version to the United States for the first time, even though the commission that put Canova to work came from North Carolina in 1816.
"I had the tickets," Ms.
Coin said by phone from Rome.
"I should have been in New York on the fourth of May.
I am the godmother" of the exhibition at the Frick.
But she said that orthopedic problems and a possible knee replacement stopped her.
Mr Salomon called her "a force of nature." Not only is she the president of the Canova museum in tiny Possagno, 350 miles from Rome, she is the president of Friends of Venice Italy, a New York-based group that raises money to support the Venice International Foundation.
She is the president of that group, too.
Under the Venice International Foundation's umbrella is the Civic Museums Foundation of Venice, which runs the museums there.
She and her husband, Piergiorgio Coin — who has produced wine and olive oil since selling his family's department stores — live in a famous Palladian villa on the Grand Canal, Palazzo Barbaro.
Henry James stayed there from time to time, and it inspired the setting for his novel "The Wings of the Dove." (The character Mrs.
Gareth was a reworking of the Boston art collector and museum donor Isabella Stewart Gardner.) James was not the only well-known visitor.
Others included the poet Robert Browning, the painters Claude Monet and William Merritt Chase and the novelist Edith Wharton.
Coin's New York, when she makes the trip, seems to center on the Upper East Side, not far from the Frick.
The choreographer Susan Stroman, a friend from the Friends of Venice board, said one compass point is Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant just up Madison Avenue from the Carlyle Hotel, where Ms.
Coin usually stays.
"I take her to the theater and the ballet, but before we do anything, we have to have that espresso at Saint Ambroeus," Ms.
Stroman said.
"We can't do anything until we have that espresso.".
"She has unbelievable energy," Ms.
Stroman said. "Maybe it's the espresso.".
Another Friends of Venice board member, Jonathan Marder, said that Ms.
Coin "always talks about smoking.".
"She says Venice is a small city and she clearly loves it," he said, "but if she has a cigarette outside, someone calls her husband.
In New York, she says she can smoke all the way from the Carlyle to Uniqlo, which she loves.".
"She says New York is unbelievably free," Mr Marder continued.
"In Europe, there is a desire to cling to the ideas of aristocracy.
That's not her.
She is the least snobbish person I know, and in a way, I think of her as an American.
She believes in artists and accomplishment.
She believes in the superiority of great talent like Canova.
It's as if she's perfectly matched to appreciate George Washington.".
And Ms.
Coin is passionate about the first president.
"I was there" — in Venice, visiting — "when she was trying to make this happen," Ms.
Stroman said, referring to the Frick exhibition.
"She was all excited to tell me about it and wanted it to come to America.
She knew of the excitement about the Revolution because of 'Hamilton' and how Americans seem to have been tapping into it.
The idea that Thomas Jefferson would have been involved with this sculpture of George Washington" — it was Jefferson who suggested Canova for the commission — "seemed to her so exciting that she felt the Americans needed to see it.".
Coin said that when she discovered the Canova museum had the Washington models, she wondered how she could "connect our treasure in Italy with the United States.".
That was before she met Mr Salomon, who already knew the story, including its devastating finale.
Canova's statue — the final, marble version — lasted only 10 years before it was destroyed in a fire in the state house in Raleigh.
The ceiling fell in, smashing the statue into pieces.
"I loved the story" Mr Salomon said.
"I had gone to North Carolina.
I had seen the fragments.
I knew the story and I knew the objects.
I always thought this would be a wonderful story to tell at the Frick.".
A curator is like that.
A writer has a story that sooner or later becomes a novel or a play.
A curator dreams of an exhibition to stage.
So when Mr Salomon met Ms.
Coin and she said she had become the president of the Canova museum, they hit it off.
"She said, 'Why don't we do something together?'" he recalled.
"I said, 'Why don't we do Washington?'".
Canova's Washington looks younger than the wigged statesman of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait.
In the exhibition, the Frick's own Gilbert Stuart, acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1918, the year before he died, is across the room from a portrait of Canova.
It was painted, in London, during the time Canova was working on the Washington statue.
But Canova and Washington never met — Washington had been dead for 17 years before Canova received the commission (and, obviously, the body for the statue in the buff was someone else's).
Canova worked from a bust owned by an American diplomat who shipped it to Canova's studio in Rome.
The bust was by Giuseppe Ceracchi, who had visited America and had done busts of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Ceracchi also considered making a Statue of Liberty, nearly a century before France sent one over, but never got around to it.
He did not have time.
He was guillotined in 1801 after he was implicated in an assassination plot against Napoleon Bonaparte.
"People wrote at the time that Ceracchi's Washington was the most lifelike of all," Mr Salomon said.
So what about the Canova? What would Washington have said about it?.
"Washington was shy about images," Mr Salomon said.
"I don't think he'd have been thrilled by this.".
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