From the outset, David Bindman makes it clear that Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Their Critics is about the use and abuse of Immanuel Kant in interpretations of sculpture. In his preface, he states that the book constitutes a defense of a “discrete” Kantianism. He argues that Kant’s ideas circulated and trickled down, pervading theoretical aesthetics and artists’ discourses—but that the ideas were transformed in the process. Bindman’s convincing claim is that a vulgar or unauthorized Kantianism operated in the work of the main sculptors of Kant’s era, between about 1780 and 1840—including the medium’s two leading practitioners, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen—and influenced the way their work was interpreted.

Neither sculptor admitted to being influenced by Kant. Though this professed ignorance may have been a ruse, it is also possible that they were as unschooled in Kant’s aesthetics as they claimed. Bindman makes the vital point that Kant himself probably would have been equally averse to be associated with sculptors. His work was never intended as a recipe for artists, and he was rather vague as to how his ideas would relate to artistic practice. His Critique of Judgment (1790) dealt with the place of “the aesthetic” in a philosophical account of the rules, orders, and mechanisms of life and its interpretation. The text grappled with beauty and perception, striving to connect the dots between the strict rationality of Enlightenment ethics and the domain of the senses. It is about aesthetic judgment, not a blueprint for the creative act—or, if so, only in the most general sense.

Given this circumstance, Bindman carves out a difficult task for himself: that of connecting Canova and Thorvaldsen with Kant, against the grain of these figures’ conscious intentions, and in the absence of any direct links between them. However, he convincingly and thoroughly moves through the many art-philosophical meanderings of Kant’s self-appointed disciples across Europe: Carl Ludwig Fernow, Karl Philipp Moritz, Quatremère de Quincy, and Leopoldo Cicognara. For this reason, Bindman’s book is a fascinating breakdown of a century of aesthetic thinking based on (and sometimes veering away from) Kant’s model. Yet in his readings of Canova and Thorvaldsen’s sculptures, Bindman does not have much new to add. The reader is seldom led beyond the established dualism of “sensuous/Catholic/Mediterranean” (Canova) and “austere/Protestant/Nordic” (Thorvaldsen). The treatment of the latter’s pivotal work on the restoration of the Aegina marbles only grazes the surface; this is a pity, because that may be where “Kantianism” is most apparent in Thorvaldsen, as well as in the reception of his subsequent works.

Warm Flesh, Cold Marble is divided into two main parts: “Sculpture in Practice: Gods and Heroes, Men and Women” and “Sculpture in Theory: The ‘Philosophic’ Critics.” Through subchapters concerning gender, sensuality, color, and the relation between materiality and metaphysics in sculpture, Bindman presents key issues of the era. A final chapter, “Back to Kant,” aims to tie the narrative up neatly. Here, the “Kantian revolution”—the separation of the aesthetic from the sensual—is invoked. Bindman links this “revolution” with Michael Fried’s now-classic binary of absorption versus theatricality, and uses it to propose that Kant did, somehow, influence the practice of both artists. Bindman argues that Thorvaldsen is truly post-Kantian, Canova perhaps less so—but that the latter is propelled toward the Kantian revolution not least through exposure to Thorvaldsen’s stringent and more absorptive or inward-looking style.

The era of Canova and Thorvaldsen bred genius worship across the arts, from Lord Byron to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Such people—including the two sculptors at the heart of Bindman’s book—had to accommodate the divinity bestowed upon them in their everyday lives. For this purpose, Thorvaldsen likely cultivated the idea that he was a humble man, not a born member of the elite or an intellectual. His father was a minor craftsman, originally from Iceland, who worked as a woodcarver at the main shipyard of Copenhagen. Thorvaldsen senior was not a first-rate artist by any account, and allegedly his son, in his childhood years, helped him by drawing designs for his carving. The whole thing smacks of the period notion of artist-genius—a marriage between the Enlightenment’s ideal notion that every person is free and can fashion herself or himself according to talent, and the Romantic idea of the artistic mind and soul as something that soars above base, material concerns such as class.

Indeed, the story of Thorvaldsen’s ordinary roots is not unlike that of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the “founder” of art history and archaeology, whose father was a poor cobbler, and who plays a key role in Bindman’s narrative. From the late eighteenth century, a primary notion of artistic creation was selecting the best bequeathed to the present from the past—without exposing oneself to accusations of mere imitation. The great modern dilemma of art was born; and antiquity in its Enlightenment version, primarily as characterized by Winckelmann, was the major shareholder. This is the background against which both Canova’s and Thorvaldsen’s work must be seen.

Kant is part of this broader disciplinary development, and can be said indirectly to propagate Winckelmann’s ideas—or to deliver the philosophical equivalent of the latter’s thoughts on the history of antiquity. The Critique of Judgment addresses the matter of art’s imitative qualities and responsibilities very much in line with Winckelmann’s art-historical endeavors. Kant sets up Nachahmung (imitation) as the ideal to pursue artistically, and Nachäffung (mindless aping) as its base opposite (Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed., Karl Vörlander, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1974, 172–74). But the few, short lines bestowed upon this crucial relation by Kant are, at most, a moral prescription on how to converse with the ancient spirit of artistic genius through the diligent study of artworks. Kant was not of much concrete use to artists; on a practical level, his ideas did not amount to more than a recommendation to take heed of tradition while also avoiding the numbing influence of previous artistic styles. Thus, the “equation of originality” that could be inferred from Kant’s theories could be expressed in the following form: The Imitation of Ancient ideals minus Time, plus Artistic Spirit, times Craftsmanship, equals ART. Here, both Art and Artistic Spirit are constants: the study of past masterworks, cleansed of their time-bound accidences, distills into an artistic capacity. Transformed via craftsmanship into a work of art, it becomes suited to its own time and perfectly expressive of its idiom. Kant did not mean “works of antiquity” alone, but referred more generally to the principle that each era needs to find its own, specific voice or style.

Friedrich Schlegel, another Kantianist, felt that “one of the most relevant tests of true artistic mastery remains the ability to heal artworks of antiquity” (Friedrich Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke. Band 10. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der romantischen Dichtkunst. Neue Kunst und Litteratur. Alte Weltgeschichte, Vienna: Jacob Mayer, 1825, 334; quotation translated by myself and Neil Martin Stanford). This concept unites Kant more clearly with Thorvaldsen than Bindman is able to argue. Moreover, it connects Kant’s lofty philosophy with Winckelmann’s influential art-historical and archaeological views. The period at issue in Bindman’s study was the heyday of Antikenergänzung, the completion of ancient relics by contemporary artists. Sculptors were called upon quite literally to “heal” antique finds, adding to ancient fragments what was missing, and thereby learning something useful about the lost golden art of the Greeks. (The most important are the Parthenon frieze, which has never been artistically restored, and the pediment figures from the Aegina temple, which were restored by Thorvaldsen; see Raimund Wünsche, ed., Kampf um Troja: 200 Jahre Ägineten in München, Munich: Josef Fink, 2011). Canova flatly refused to do this in the case of the Parthenon frieze.

Thorvaldsen, too, had his doubts about such an enterprise. According to the latter’s biographer, he reflected: “It is a thankless task to restore the art of Antiquity. If you don’t do it well enough it would have been better if you had never tried, and if you do it well it will seem as if you had done nothing at all” (Wünsche, op. cit., 154). But Thorvaldsen’s restoration of the Aegina group (1815–17) for King Ludwig of Bavaria was considered a resounding success, a rebirth of the gods and heroes of antiquity. Thorvaldsen cleverly redeemed himself as an artist in his own right—as opposed to a craftsman who simply mends the broken shards of ancient sculpture—by extrapolating one crucial figure from the complex of fragments and transforming it into a unique masterpiece, the sculpture Hope (1817). Thorvaldsen thereby turned his artisanal, restorative task into a bravado act: the body-snatching of a Greek original for a contemporary sculptural purpose, a free-standing, solitary “masterwork” in the Romantic sense. This is the realization in art of Kant’s and Winckelmann’s ideas of imitation and free development of an aesthetic ideal.

However, even Thorvaldsen’s breakthrough work, Jason with the Golden Fleece (1802), did something similar: it allowed the sensuous to sneak in between all the quoting from antiquity and the hard-nosed stylization that was his age’s definition of “antique style.” Many felt that this work managed not just to match, but also to surpass, all prototypes. Although Jason is marked by a formal rigor, from head and helmet in numismatic profile, over the tense lines of the torso and the rock-hard axial symmetry, the ram’s fleece introduces to the sculpture everything which is unmanageable, dirty, and chaotic. This living, natural material, which inserts itself in the delineated world of cold marble, tells of the eternal problem of art: how to impose order and beauty on the chaos of matter. This is one of the first occasions where the surface is given extreme attention in a sculpture with a Neoclassical theme. All the small folds and curls in the fleece are a seething denial of the calm of the contour and the stone, as well as a cry for attention from the sensuality of matter, an insistence on the tactile qualities of sculpture as one of the points where it touches the world it depicts. Thorvaldsen allows warm and cold to coexist in ways overlooked by Bindman, with his repetition of the rigid binaries that pervade the writing on sculpture in this period.

Sculpture must be both ideal and natural, hard marble and living flesh. Accordingly, Ennio Quirino Visconti, director of the Musée Napoleon, exclaimed upon seeing the Parthenon frieze in 1814: “In the best preserved parts do we not rediscover the traces of a chisel which knew how to soften the marble and transform it into supple and living flesh?”(quoted in Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso, London: I. B. Tauris, 2012, 46) That might sound like pure Canova—but Thorvaldsen could also do it, and Warm Flesh, Cold Marble would, for all its merits, have been an even better read had these elements been addressed more directly in the interpretations of the two artists’ work.