He had a model for this: the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, who was named dictator during a crisis of the early republic, triumphed over the enemy, and then voluntarily relinquished power and returned to his farm. His act of renunciation made Cincinnatus the very embodiment of Roman republican virtue, and Canova wanted his Washington to be the same: hence the tablet on which “Giorgio Washington” drafts his Italian-language resignation.

More than the get-up, it’s the bearing of Canova’s lost Washington that most expresses a European adulation of American values in the years after 1776. (In his studio in Rome, Canova’s assistants were tasked with reading to the artist from a history of the American Revolution while he chiseled away at the block.) Unlike Canova’s giant statues of nude, not-so-giant Napoleon, this one mutes its subject’s military prowess. It aims instead to embody Washington’s choice of principles over power, which Canova saw, at least in the early 19th century, as uniquely American.

What, anyway, are American values? Washington, Jefferson and the bulk of their fellow revolutionaries were slave holders, after all. But what the classicized statue implies is that certain ideals, notably liberty and justice for all, endure beyond any individual presidential biography, and those ideals are not invalidated when our leaders flout them.

What art can do — all it can do, really, though it’s not nothing — is affirm our ideals’ existence and endurance, in the late 18th century or the early 21st. Who we are, as Americans, is not just the sum total of our past achievements and disgraces. We are also guardians of the ideals Canova saw in us, heirs to a revolutionary tradition with life in it yet.