Stories in Stone (28 page)

By finding the essential elements of humanity and transmitting them to stone, Michelangelo had in turn bestowed a sense of
grace on marble.
No one who has seen the
David
or the
Pietà
could ever look at the material again and not be reminded of refinement, of the ethereal spirit of humanity.
And those qualities
eventually became synonymous with the stone, whether the viewer had seen Michelangelo’s work or not.

Everything about
David
is awe inspiring—his size, his location in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, the feeling of reverence in the air around
him—yet only a few yards away is the Gallery of the
Slaves
, with its five roughed-out statues.
The figure in each appears to be wrenching himself out of his marble bounds.
In all five
you can see the process of how Michelangelo chiseled a man out of rock, of how he mixed precise and rough cuts, of how he
revealed the textures and light within the stone.
These pieces are not made of flesh.
You know Michelangelo was working with
rock.
They are not sensuous.
They have a density and a mass.
They are grounded.

Michelangelo described his process of sculpting as the “art which operates by taking away.” Other sculptors have written of
releasing the spirit or story within the stone.
I do not have the experience or knowledge to question artists’ beliefs, but
the unfinished blocks illustrate a profound link between man and stone, a link where a man recognized the strengths and weaknesses
of stone and worked with them to create astounding works of art.
Exploited to its fullest by Michelangelo, the bond between
stone and humankind is central not only to sculpting but also to architecture.

Like Amoco, Michelangelo also suffered for his decision to use Carrara.
Instead of losing face and 70 to 80 million dollars,
as Amoco did, Michelangelo almost died twice to get at the stone.
⁸
In December 1516 he convinced Pope Leo X and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici that they should let him design a new façade for
the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.
The façade would be “both architecturally and sculpturally, the mirror of all Italy,”
wrote Michelangelo to the cardinal’s treasurer and liaison, Domenico Buoninsegni.
⁹
Michelangelo proposed a more audacious undertaking than anything he, or anyone since antiquity, had done.
The last great
all-marble building in Italy had been constructed in 203, and the entire façade of San Lorenzo would be marble, including
a dozen monolithic columns.

Although Michelangelo never ended up carving any pieces of marble for San Lorenzo, he spent years arranging for stone to be
transported from Carrara to Florence.
Ultimately, dozens of different-sized blocks arrived, some of which he later may have
used in the Medici Chapel.

He also sold blocks, but most of his marble probably was stolen after he left Florence for good in 1534.
His initial task
was to locate good stone.
Michelangelo could have worked with a middleman, who would find, cut, and deliver marble, but he
didn’t trust the ones in Carrara and nearby Seravezza, two of the main towns of the marble district.
The men cheated him.
They didn’t understand marble.
They didn’t even know how to quarry marble, or so he wrote Buoninsegni.
¹⁰
In order to ensure good rock during the years he worked on San Lorenzo, Michelangelo traveled to the quarries, or
cave
, at Carrara and Seravezza nineteen times and spent eighteeen months organizing and supervising an ever-changing group of
helpers.
At Seravezza, about ten miles south of Carrara, he also had to coordinate building and widening several miles of
new road, part of which required men with picks to cut a route deep into the marble mountains.

After finding the right stone, Michelangelo hired a crew of quarrymen, or
cavatori
, and
scarpellini
to cut blocks out of the mountain.
First, they cut a narrow trench, then they pounded in either iron or wood wedges and forced
the stone to split into a clean face.
This is the same method Mr.
Tarbox would “invent” almost three hundred years later.
It is also the method used as far back as the Third Dynasty (ca 2686–2613 BCE) in Egypt.
About the only significant difference
between the early Egyptians and Michelangelo’s
cavatori
was the evolution of the wedges from copper (up to 1500 BCE) to bronze (up to the eighth or sixth century BCE) to iron.
¹¹

The quarries were also his mill; the notoriously penny-pinching Michelangelo wasn’t about to pay to transport excess stone
or for stone that might have hidden flaws.
To shape the stone, which might become a smaller block, a roughed-out figure still
encased in a block, or a column, the
scarpellini
referred to pages of Michelangelo’s detailed drawings.
One book of his drawings shows twenty-two different shapes, many of
which required several exact copies.
By August 1517 eight blocks and three figures, along with another half dozen cartloads
of marble, were ready for transport.

And here the fun began.
Not only did Michelangelo have to figure out how to move his unwieldy blocks, by land, by sea, and
by river, but he had to pay exorbitant fees.
In ancient Greece, for example, transporting stone had cost ten times what it
cost to quarry, and the price doubled for every hundred miles it moved overland in Roman times.
By Michelangelo’s day, fees
had dropped, but still constituted a major cost of working in marble.
He couldn’t avoid the middlemen who demanded money for
everything from oxen rental to harbor fees to storage dues.

In moving stone,Michelangelo, and for that matter all movers of masses, had a simple goal: to resist the pull of gravity.
Any time gravity led a block astray catastrophe struck.
A block could slide too quickly down a slope and maim or kill.
A heavily
laden cart could sink into a road built across a swamp.
A block could drop from a hoist and turn a boat into driftwood.
To
counter the adverse and untimely affects of gravity, Michelangelo relied on men and rope.
Neither came easily.
He wrote his
brother that if the Carrarese “are not fools, they are knaves and rascals.”
¹²
A crew walked off the job taking the hundred ducats he had paid them, and others quit in the middle of projects.
The ropes,
one of which was 422 feet long and weighed 566 pounds, could take days to arrive from Pisa, Florence, or Genoa.
Michelangelo’s
detailed records show that rope accounted for 18 percent of the total transportation costs.
He also had to borrow pulleys,
buy wood for sleds, and order custom-made turnbuckles and iron rings.

With all the equipment ready, the men tied the milled marble to a hardwood sledge called a
lizza
and slid it down
lizza
paths, or
lizzatura
.
The ones in Carrara, which haven’t been used in decades, look more like ski slopes than ramps for lowering multi-ton blocks.
The
lizza
traveled on greased or soaped poles laid like railroad ties.
Rope wrapped around posts embedded along the
lizzatura
slowed the descent.
As the block passed over a pair of poles, men picked up the poles and moved them around to the downslope
side of the block.
Rope men kept the rope taut around the posts until they ran out of material and had to move their arm-thick
lines to the next post.

“It has been a bigger job than I anticipated to sling it [a column] down,” Michelangelo wrote to a friend in August 1518.
The column was the first to be quarried for San Lorenzo, and the first marble column quarried since Roman times.
Michelangelo
continued: “Some mistake was made in slinging it, and one man had his neck broken and died instantly, and it nearly cost me
my life.”
¹³
They had gotten the column to within thirty-five yards of the road.

Seven months later Michelangelo tried to move another column.
His workmen had lowered it only a hundred feet when a metal
ring broke and the column shattered.
“After it broke we saw the utter rascality of it .
.
.
the iron in it was no thicker
than the back of a knife,” he wrote in April 1519.
¹⁴
Again, Michelangelo and his assistants almost died.

Not deterred by his near-death experiences, Michelangelo willed his marble blocks and columns off the mountains to a road
for their five-to eight-mile-long journey to the Ligurian Sea.
“Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset
with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and
that
being the road,” wrote Charles Dickens of an 1844 visit to Carrara.
Nothing had changed in five hundred years, he observed.
The carts were clumsy, the mistreated oxen often died on the spot, as did their drivers, “crushed to death beneath the wheels.”
¹⁵

Dickens may have exaggerated, but Michelangelo’s columns and blocks eventually reached the sea, where a boat would carry the
stone thirty miles down the coast to Pisa.
To get the marble on the boat, which Michelangelo had spent several months locating,
required building a ramp, digging a trench to lower the boat, and dragging the marble up the ramp.
As workers loaded one block
with a three-legged hoist, an iron ring broke.
The boat was not damaged, and no one died, but the breakage delayed that shipment
by another week.
In Pisa, the men used another hoist to unload marble into a storage yard, where it sat waiting for the winter
rains to arrive to raise the Arno River.

“I am dying of vexation through my inability to do what I want to do .
.
.
the Arno is completely dried up .
.
.
On this account
I am more disgruntled than any man on Earth,” wrote Michelangelo.
¹⁶
Even he had to wait on the weather.
Winter was also a fallow time for farm lands, which allowed Michelangelo to hire oxen.
He needed them to pull barges loaded with stone fifty-five miles upriver to Signa, an impassable point on the Arno about ten
miles from Florence.
Depending upon weather and the recalcitrance of oxen, the trip took from one to four weeks.
At Signa,
the men unloaded stone onto oxen-drawn carts for the final one- or two-day trip into Florence.

The first blocks reached Signa in January 1519.
By March sixteen shipments ferrying forty-nine blocks had arrived.
Michelangelo’s
first of a dozen planned columns didn’t make it to Florence until two years later.
No other columns arrived.
Several broke
or never left the quarry and six reached Pisa, only to vanish to history.
¹⁷
Despite his fame,Michelangelo’s disappearing columns did not lead to the famous phrase “He lost his marbles.” Or maybe it
did; thirteen months prior to the arrival of the lone column, Pope Leo X had canceled the San Lorenzo project.
Michelangelo
didn’t go crazy, but he did write that he had been “ruined over the said work of San Lorenzo” and suffered an “enormous insult.”
¹⁸
Additional marble blocks arrived throughout 1521.
Michelangelo decided to use the stone elsewhere.

Michelangelo’s labors are the travails of countless others who struggled to get stone out of the ground and transport it across
land and water.
Quarrying has been called the most conservative of all crafts because it changed little from its origins more
than four thousand years ago to the late 1800s, when machine power replaced manpower.
¹⁹
We rightly marvel at the great works of architecture from the preindustrial world, extolling their design, their ingenuity
in construction, and their durability.
Perhaps we ought to marvel more that they got any stone to the sites.

Prior to Michelangelo, no one was more obsessed with marble than the ancient Romans.
They traded for it, stole it, quarried
it, and taxed it.
Archaeologist Rudulfo Lanciani estimated that fifty thousand marble columns arrived at the Roman port of
Ostia, of which nine thousand remained in the late 1800s.
Another archaeologist has called marble the “sine qua non raw material”
of the ancient Romans.
²⁰

Early Romans, like all other builders, began by using local rocks.
As early as the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, quarries
on the Palatine Hill provided soft, olive gray tuff, a volcanic rock also quarried from the surrounding Alban Hills and Monte
Sabatini.
Tuff and other nearby rocks, such as travertine and lava, remained popular throughout the republican era, but by
the Republic’s waning days in the first century BCE, marble had moved to the forefront of popularity in the city.

Not everyone approved of the change.
Pliny the Elder, in his
Natural
History
, discussed marble’s early users, all wealthy politicians, and concluded that the fashion for marble was the “leading folly
of the day.” He deplored marble as an extravagant display of luxury and, in some of the earliest condemnation of habitat destruction,
he decried the hewing down of mountains simply for use as delights for the imagination.
“One cannot but feel ashamed of the
men of ancient times,” he wrote.