With more than 100 works, the exhibition Canova, Hayez, Cicognara. The Last Glory of Venice celebrates the bicentenary of the opening of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, a special moment in the history of Venice, and recalls the cultural reawakening of the city promoted by three intellectuals from 1815 onwards, the date that there were returned from Paris the four horses of Saint Mark’s, a work symbolising Venice.

The undoubted leader of this fortunate state of affairs was Count Leopoldo Cicognara, an intellectual and the president of the Accademia di Belle Arti who, together with his friend Antonio Canova the leading protector of the project, and with Francesco Hayez, worked to create a museum of an international standing, one able to develop Venice’s extraordinary art heritage and, at the same time, to promote contemporary art.

The masterpieces on show are divided into ten thematic sections; among them there stands out the reunified series of works sent in 1818 to the court in Vienna for the wedding of Emperor Franz I a series known as the “Tribute of the Venetian Provinces”, and which has returned to Venice for the first time in two hundred years. Among these Canova’s The Muse Polyhymnia, groups of sculptures, two altars, a bronze and wooden table with its top covered with refined Murano glass, and some precious books, all representing the highest artistic output of Venetian Neoclassicism.

Of the highest quality is the section devoted to the return of the four horses of Saint Mark’s and the cameo Giove Egioco, as well as a commemoration of the acquisition of drawings by Leonardo and Raphael from the collection of Giuseppe Bossi, a friend of Canova and Cicognara, someone who greatly enriched the heritage of the Accademia.d the heritage of the Accademia.