As Pietra Santa is nearing completion and my thoughts are beginning to turn to the next marble stone (retrieved from the same river in the Carrara region as the Pietra Santa stone) I've been reading through the entries in the journal I kept during my stay there. They include notes on a book about Michelangelo and the marble quarries of Carrara:
... the artist as the revealer rather than the maker, the midwife rather than creator, the modest servant of a nature ensconced in stone. Rather than imposing his will upon the marble, he draws out the life incubated in it. This suggests a paradoxical balance between willful design and spontaneous discovery: the concetto (concept) is bound within the stone, but the intelletto (intellect) guides the hand in drawing it out. ...
Also a local myth about how the marble came to be in Carrara - I particularly love the ending:
God had almost finished making the world when he grew tired. He called two angels, one smart one and one not, and directed them to finish the last remaining chore: to take sacks of ore, granite, marble and other mountain-building materials and spread them evenly over the Italian peninsula. 'I'll start at Venice and make the Alps,' the clever angel told the dunce. 'You start at Genoa and make the Apennines.' But the dumb angel dozed off at the first beach he found, below what is now Carrara. Waking in a panic, he dropped all his marble in a heap and slunk back to Heaven. 'What have you done with all that precious marble?' God thundered, but then he smiled. 'This may not be so bad after all. Now artists will come from all over the world and make sculptures for me.'
