Carrara

And when you talk about Florence and sculpture, for anybody who's listening or watching, if you know Michelangelo, the sculptor, you know, he worked with marble.

He would go to Carrara, which is a city in Italy, in Tuscany, to look for blocks of marble.

And when he would see the block of marble, he didn't see a block of marble.

What he saw was the sculpt, the piece of art that was within that block of marble.

Well, he loved everything about the place, I think, and, uh, you know, the marble was one thing, but he just liked, um, collecting everything, and obviously, the, the buildings were, were part of that.

I mean, the stones were one thing, and we used to go on trips to, um, to Italy with him to collect marble, buy marble at Carrara.

That was like a, a great adventure.

And such a skill actually working that stone as well.

And when you talk about Florence and sculpture, for anybody who's listening or watching, if you know Michelangelo, the sculptor, You know, he worked with marble.

He would go to Carrara, which is a city in Italy, in Tuscany, to look for blocks of marble.

And when he would see the block of marble, he didn't see a block of marble.

What he saw was the piece of art that was within that block of marble.

It's the story of the seasons and how bewitching a god always has unforeseen consequences.

Carved between 1621 and 1622, when Bernini was just 23 years old, this life-sized Carrara marble catches a violent, dramatic climax with unprecedented emotional intensity.

But to fully appreciate what stands before you, we have to unravel three intertwining elements.

The ancient myth carved into the stone, the artistic technique, and ruthless pebble politics behind its creation.

Michelangelo's David is considered to be one of the greatest examples of Renaissance sculpture.

Carved from a piece of marble from a quarry near the Tuscan town of Carrara, the statue is a nude male standing 517 centimetres tall Michelangelo was not the first artist to begin carving a statue of David from this marble block.

The Florentine sculptor Agostino di Duccio had been first contracted by the overseers of the Office of Works of Florence Cathedral way back in 1464, and he had been contracted to create the statue as one of twelve figures that would appear on the buttresses at the recently completed cathedral.

Having begun to shape the feet and the legs, he stopped work on the statue in 1466, and work only resumed a decade later when Antonio Rossellino took over.

The passage is not by any means agreeable when the current is swollen and strong.

We arrived at Carrara within a few hours.

In good time next morning we got some ponies and went out to see the marble quarries.

There are four or five great glens running up into a range of lofty hills until they can run no longer and are stopped by being abruptly strangled by nature.

When we stood aside to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair of oxen, for it had but one small block of marble on it, coming down, I hailed in my heart the man who sat upon the heavy yoke to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts, and who faced backwards, not before him, as the very devil of true despotism.

He had a great rod in his hand with an iron point, and when they could plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard or two in the madness of intense pain, repeated all these persuasions with increased intensity of purpose when they stopped again, got them on once more, forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent, and when their writhing and smarting and the weight behind them bore them plunging down the precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his head and gave a great whoop and hello, as if he had achieved something, and had no idea that they might shake him off and blindly mash his brains upon the road in the noontide of his triumph.

Standing in one of the many studi of Carrara that afternoon, for it is a great workshop full of beautifully finished copies in marble of almost every figure, group, and bust we know, it seemed at first so strange to me that those exquisite shapes, replete with grace and thought and delicate repose, should grow out of all this toil and sweat and torture.

But I soon found a parallel to it and an explanation of it in every virtue that springs up in miserable ground and every good thing that has its birth in sorrow and distress.

It's interesting.

If you go to Carrara, Italy, which is where they do the marble, marble mining.

You've heard of Carrara Marble, right? They have these tourist shops and they have little marble statues of David.

On the left side, they're David with penis.

On the right side, it's David with no penis.