Authors: David B. Williams
Pliny was a lone voice of opprobrium, railing against a time-tested formula.
For the Romans of the late Republic and early
imperial age, marble equaled luxury, luxury signified wealth, and wealth translated into power.
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As classics scholar J.
Clayton Fant has observed, marble was a particularly good symbol of wealth because it was expensive,
imported, and unnecessary.
Archaeologists usually point to Greece as the reason Romans turned to marble.
Completely conquered by the second century BCE,
Greece and its buildings stood as shining examples to the Romans, sort of like the big brother or sister a younger sibling
wants to emulate.
Beginning with the Cycladic culture over three thousand years earlier, the people of the northeastern Mediterranean
had utilized marble for art, religion, and architecture.
The Greeks chose white marble for their greatest buildings because
of the stone’s luminosity and sparkle, proximity, and ease of cutting, at least relative to granite.
When the Romans subjugated
Greece, they started quarrying the Greeks’ local stone from areas such as Mount Hymettus, near Athens, and Mount Pentelicus,
location of the quarries for the Parthenon’s stone.
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Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but working your former opponent’s quarries also signified power.
We not only
conquered you, we are taking your stones for our monuments and you cannot stop us.
Lord Elgin and the marble panels he pilfered
from the Parthenon get worse press, but the Romans liberated Greek statues two thousand years before the British.
They repeated
a similar takeover when Egypt fell under Augustus.
The conquerors acquired vast new quarries, as well as an obelisk or ten.
As their empire grew, so did the Romans’ desire for marble and other flashy stone.
From Numidia they quarried butter yellow
giallo antico
.
The island of Chios produced
portasanta
, a stone often compared to roast beef in color and texture; its name translates to “holy door,” a reference to its use as
doorjambs at St.
Peter’s and elsewhere.
In Turkey the Romans acquired the brecciated purple, black, and white
africano
.
A stone that resembles broken Oreo cookies, with the straightforward name
bianco e
nero antico
, arrived from St.
Girons, France.
The Romans went to Egypt and took a purple igneous stone,
porfido
or
lapis porphyrites
, from which came the words porphyry and purple.
Back in Greece, they raided Thessaly for
verde antico
, an emerald and white metamorphic stone, known as serpentine for its resemblance to snake skin.
Closer to home the Romans
quarried their lone indigenous polychromatic marble,
cottanello
, a white and brownish red, swirled stone.
Although the Romans considered these rocks to be marble, modern geologists do not.
To them, a marble is metamorphosed limestone.
To the Romans, who called marble
marmor
—from the Greek adjective
marmareos
, meaning shining or shimmering—marble referred to any hard rock suitable for sculpture or architecture.
Such “honorary marbles,”
to borrow a term from archaeology, included granite, breccia (rocks composed of angular fragments), porphyry, and serpentine.
Not that this expansive definition died out with the Romans.
Go to any store selling architectural stone and you will find
a plethora of non–metamorphosed limestone labeled as marble.
Despite the abundance of colorful stone the Romans did not stop using white marble.
Seeking a local source, they found it
in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, about two hundred miles north of Rome.
The Romans knew the stone as Lunense marble, after
the town of Luna, a port on the Ligurian Sea six miles from Carrara, originally celebrated for its cheese,wood, and wine.
Later heralded as Carrara marble, after the town nestled at the foot of the Apuans, the creamy white rock has been quarried
for well over two thousand years.
Good evidence, including tool marks and written sources, shows that the Romans began quarrying in the second century BCE.
By the time of Augustus’s rule, from 27 BCE to 14 CE, Lunense marble had achieved its sine qua non status in public buildings.
(Ever disgruntled by other people’s ostentatious tastes, Pliny criticized the first person to use solid Carrara columns in
his home.) Recently, archaeologists have dug down through the layers of the ancient stone dumps, known as
ravaneti
, that cover the Apuans and found pieces of cut marble carbon-dated at 763 BCE.
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The Etruscans inhabited the region at the time and probably collected marble they found on the ground instead of quarrying
it.
Carrara achieved its status in part because the Emperor owned the quarries.
His minions established an efficient management
system, which employed a host of functionaries to supervise skilled workers and slaves, manage expenses, and market stone.
Quarries operated as assembly lines, offering semifinished decorative and architectural elements, such as columns, tables,
entablatures, and statue bases.
Skilled craftsmen worked on specific elements, aided by men who understood the strengths and
weaknesses of marble and advised how to work the stone.
Finished products traveled from Luna by boat down the coast to the Roman port of Ostia and twenty miles up the Tiber River
to an area in Rome now known as the Marmorata.
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In contrast to Michelangelo, the Romans were able to transport massive quantities of stone because they had established a
widespread and well-run network to do so.
Successful transport of marble benefited from its elite status: The emperor controlled
the system, which supplied stone for his projects and for his wealthy friends.
You can imagine that most suppliers would want
to stay on the good side of the emperor.
As the closest source of high-quality white marble to Rome, Carrara dominated the market for the next two centuries, when
politics and the silting in and closing down of Luna’s harbor raised the prominence of eastern marbles.
But for those two-hundred-plus
years including and following Augustus’s reign, Carrara gave Roman buildings their face.
Wander the Forum in Rome and you
cannot help but notice the gleaming columns, the arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus, or the elegant Trajan’s
Column.
Wherever Romans wanted to show off their wealth they built with Carrara marble.
Most marble, though, except for columns
and capitals, served little structural purpose in buildings, whether grand or more utilitarian.
Instead, inexpensive materials,
such as brick and concrete, provided the structure and thin slabs of marble provided the look of luxury.
Augustus’s famed
boast of finding Rome a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble was a veiled reference to this use of Carrara.
With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, Rome settled into decay that lasted for a thousand years.
A few popes tried to reinvigorate
the Eternal City, but limited monumental building occurred.
When Pope Martin V arrived in Rome in 1420 he found it so “dilapidated
and deserted that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city.”
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Martin started a building and renovation spree that led to new roads, new churches, and a grand hospital.
By the time Michelangelo
first visited Rome, in 1496, the city had become a center of construction.
Walking around the revitalized Rome, like architects and artists past and present, Michelangelo would have encountered the
ruins from the great buildings of the Roman Empire.
They, too, would become his teachers.
The ancient structures taught him
about the vocabulary and motifs of architecture.
Their scale inspired him and gave him the ambition to attempt a feat not
tried since the glory days of the empire, to work with columns made from a single stone, as opposed to the common practice
of building columns with drums of stone.
Although he rarely followed the classical style precisely, Michelangelo “invariably
retained essential features from ancient models in order to force the observer to recollect the source,” as James Ackerman
wrote in his classic
The Architecture
of Michelangelo
.
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In Rome, Michelangelo would also have seen scores of Greek and early Roman sculptures.
Modern art historians have argued that
sculptures such as the
Torso Belvedere
,
Lion Attacking a Horse
, and the
Cesi Juno
, the latter of which Michelangelo called “the most beautiful object in all Rome,” influenced, motivated, and stimulated him.
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They challenged his understanding of marble and showed him the stone’s possibilities.
He further learned about materials and quality from the great buildings in Rome.
He saw the marble, how the Romans splurged
by using solid blocks of it in their finest buildings, and how marble bestowed stature and elegance.
Rome gave Michelangelo
“a spark for explosions of fancy,” wrote Ackerman, explosions that helped seal his reputation and that of marble, especially
of Carrara marble.
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I first saw Carrara and its quarries from a car window, while driving north out of Pisa.
Marjorie and two friends, John and
Terry, and I were about twenty-five miles or so from the green foothills of the Apuan Alps.
Broken clouds created a pattern
of shade and light punctuated by bright white splotches, which several guidebooks explained: “No, that isn’t snow, it’s marble.”
After an initial giddiness at seeing the Carrara, however, my excitement began to fizzle.
Where were the charming old buildings?
Quarries had been worked in these mountains more or less continuously for the past five centuries and I expected quaint structures
made of the local stone.
Instead, the road felt like many other industrial/shopping mall districts I had driven by, with billboards,
stores selling marble gewgaws, and warehouses creating a monotonous blur of banality.
The stone mills—each with stacks of
marble blocks, pallets of sliced stone slabs, and massive cranes for ferrying the stone—had a certain charm, but they looked
like any stone mill you can see in Indiana.
Closer to the mountains the wide, industrial street gave way to a confusing maze of narrow, often one-way, poorly marked roads.
After circling around, getting lost, backtracking, and hoping we knew where we were, we crammed our little rental car into
a spot along a lane about twice as wide as our car.
A typical Carrarese building, a four-story, stucco-covered structure,
stood about two feet from the car door.
On the other side of the road, and twenty feet below us in a concrete-sided trench,
ran the Torrente Carrione, Carrara’s couple-of-inches-deep trickle of a stream.
Abandoning the car, the four of us wandered toward where we thought our bed and breakfast might be.
The streets closed tighter,
the sharply rising buildings turning them into canyons.
Eventually they became too narrow for cars.
The windows of many of
the buildings were festooned with drying laundry and hanging planters.
At our B&B, no one answered, so we walked into the
town center, crossing a plaza with white marble paving stones, each about the size of a brick.
Marble sidewalks and curbs
lined most streets.
Not every building was made from marble, but we had clearly entered a hub of the marble universe.
Not
that the locals respected their great stone; graffiti covered many marble walls and several marble statues.
I like to think that these same narrow streets had greeted Michelangelo when he reached Carrara 510 years earlier on his expedition
to find stone for the
Pietà
.
When we finally got into our B&B, the owner told us that Michelangelo had worked in this very building and had carved the
marble on the first-floor landing.
The owner was a very nice person and I am sure she thought she was telling the truth.
Perhaps
Michelangelo had carved it to pay for lodging;money often was in short supply for him in his younger days.
The next morning, John and I met with Paolo Conti, a geologist from the Center for Geotechnology at the University of Siena.
Conti had graciously offered to take us up into the mountains to learn more about the quarries and the geology.
We got in
his car and drove three miles or so into the Apuans and parked in a lot next to the Ponti di Vara, a stately, five-arched,
brick-and-marble bridge.
Originally a route for the railroad that crisscrossed the quarries, the Ponti di Vara is barely wide
enough for the hundreds of trucks that zip across it each day.
From the parking lot, the quarries glowed a blinding white in the sunlight as they crept halfway up Mount Maggiore, which
rose three thousand feet above us.
Across the road yellow signs pointed to several quarries, including the Roman-era Fantiscritti,
supposedly the source for the marble doorposts of the Pantheon.
Another sign read VISITA LA CAVA IN GALLERIA PIU’ BELLA DEL
MONDO, Visit the Most Beautiful Underground Quarry in the World.