| Summary: | In the mid-1870s, the playwright Lodovico Muratori (1834-1919) wrote a play based on the life of the sculptor, Antonio Canova, that focused on a fictional, unconsummated passion between Canova and his housekeeper, Luigia Giuli. This play, published by the Milanese editor Carlo Barbini concurrently with several plays about famous Italian artists, including Michelangelo, Raphael, and Tintoretto, emphasized Canova’s connection to these great masters, in particular his role as both artist and lover. By examining the way political and artistic values changed in Italy over the course of the century, this paper arges that Muratori’s insistent repetition of the trope of ‘Luigia as muse’ is an implicit critique of neoclassicism. Artistic inspiration is disengaged from imitation and the rote act of copying and located instead in the very personal and subjective emotions of the artist. By the late nineteenth century, in order to maintain the validity of an otherwise outmoded style, neoclassicism and its suffocating image of repetition were necessarily recast to fit the political, sociological and artistic developments of the time.
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