Italian Marble

Fellow appraiser Judith Vance sent me this article from the Financial Times on Italian Marble from the Tuscon town of Pietrasanta. Michelangelo used marble from the quarries in the Apuan Alps. Today artists still come to the area to sculpt using the fine Pietrasanta marble. During the early years, the Pietrasanta marble was very difficult to acquire and Carrara, about 11 miles to the north was the main center for Italian marble. The article delves into the current sculpture studios that now populate the region. Some very well contemporary art artists have either sculpted in the area or had items made in the Pietrasaant studies, including Damien Hirst .

The FT states In the end, Michelangelo built a road up to the mountain, which he named Altissima (the highest). His reward was a marble of unsurpassed whiteness, ideal for sculpture. Artists – from Giambologna and Vasari to Joan Miró, Henry Moore and more recently Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn – have been flocking to Pietrasanta ever since.

The FT article continues The contemporary art emerging out of Pietrasanta has a different narrative. One glance at the galaxy of models of Christs, Madonnas and pagan gods that are still the bread and butter of most marble studios reminds you that sculptures such as “Anatomy of an Angel” are the fruit of a figurative aesthetic, rooted in the classical tradition.

Whereas avant-garde abstractionists, such as Moore, Yasuda and Blumenfeld, challenge Pietrasanta’s artisans to work in a different style, the contemporary figurative artists ask them to remain within their traditional framework and present the sculptures in a spirit of post-modern irony. As a consequence, the manuality that has gone into the work becomes curiously invisible, eclipsed by the work’s conceptual provocations – a pregnant man, a deconstructed angel.

To read the FT article, click HERE.