shall see.”
Morrow was working up a speech for the Arts and Letters Club in Pontypool to be delivered at a luncheon lecture several months hence. It was already partly written. But with the judicious use of thoughtful pauses, Julian Morrow was able to give the Bartons the impression that his thoughts were taking form before their very eyes.
“Our awareness of transience,” Morrow continued, “jostles constantly against the hope that our stories will last. Possibly the urge to create is nothing more than the wish to contradict the inevitability of death.”
Grace Barton expressed some mock dismay at this sad thought—and it was the humour in her eyes that inspired him to continue full-voiced, unabated.
“We imagine that a human figure cannot simply vanish. So inglorious a disappearance seems impossible. And so fromantiquity, faces and bodies, heads and torsos were memorialized in mud, in sand, in clay.”
The history of sculpture, so he explained, is a history of convergence: of tools and material. Wood could not be carved without flint, just as stone could not be shaped—not finely, not reliably—until the advent of iron. As tools improved, the choice of materials became more specific to the task at hand. The need to memorialize—the urge to create tombs and portraits—became part of something else. By the time marble emerged as a lasting and surprisingly adaptable substance, by the time the tools that could work it became more sophisticated, by the time the marble quarries of Carrara began to dominate the worlds of architecture and sculpture, the motives for carving stone had become complicated. What was being immortalized by artists was not only a noble face that needed to be remembered by citizens gathered in a piazza. It was not only a parable that needed to be recalled by worshippers standing humbly in the shadows of a great cathedral. What was being caught, what artists were rescuing from the relentless stream of the temporal, was beauty itself. This is what sculptors—“from Renaissance masters,” said Morrow, “to the most wild of our young modernists”—look for in their labour. “Beauty is what they hope to preserve in the myriad varieties of our marble.”
Morrow let this settle in. His face was tanned. He smelled pleasantly of tobacco and shaving soap.
“They change what is ordinary—and what is more ordinary than stone?—into what is divine.”
But the Bartons were puzzled.
“Myriad?” Argue asked.
“Isn’t Carrara marble … well, Carrara marble?” his wife added. She pointed as she spoke to the white, weathered stone that told the story of the young Roman consul.
“Oh, my no,” said Julian Morrow. His laughter boomed. He took some delight in its effect on his audiences.
“These mountains are like sculpture,” Morrow continued. “Their surface is only the most recent exposure of an intent far beyond our capacity to understand. And we regard the evidence of eternity as we would the marks left by a chisel in an unfinished piece of stone. These are glimpses of something beyond us. Something passing from a past too distant to comprehend to future eons we cannot hope to fathom. What was the Lord thinking when he set the forces of geology into motion that created marble? What was Michelangelo thinking when, with chisel in hand, he first glimpsed the possibilities of his own genius?”
Morrow was an experienced enough public speaker to recognize long before it became a problem that he was losing the thread of where all this was going. He paused—but his confident stance seemed to insist that this was not because he’d lost whatever point he thought he was making.
He smiled at his tendency to get carried away.
“One thing, you say? Marble? No. Here, there is no single marble. There is: Statuario, Ordinario, Bianco Carrara, Bianco P, Calacatta Cremo, Arabescato Classico. The list goes on. And on. There are scores of different varieties of Carrara marble.”
Julian Morrow
Morrow was working up a speech for the Arts and Letters Club in Pontypool to be delivered at a luncheon lecture several months hence. It was already partly written. But with the judicious use of thoughtful pauses, Julian Morrow was able to give the Bartons the impression that his thoughts were taking form before their very eyes.
“Our awareness of transience,” Morrow continued, “jostles constantly against the hope that our stories will last. Possibly the urge to create is nothing more than the wish to contradict the inevitability of death.”
Grace Barton expressed some mock dismay at this sad thought—and it was the humour in her eyes that inspired him to continue full-voiced, unabated.
“We imagine that a human figure cannot simply vanish. So inglorious a disappearance seems impossible. And so fromantiquity, faces and bodies, heads and torsos were memorialized in mud, in sand, in clay.”
The history of sculpture, so he explained, is a history of convergence: of tools and material. Wood could not be carved without flint, just as stone could not be shaped—not finely, not reliably—until the advent of iron. As tools improved, the choice of materials became more specific to the task at hand. The need to memorialize—the urge to create tombs and portraits—became part of something else. By the time marble emerged as a lasting and surprisingly adaptable substance, by the time the tools that could work it became more sophisticated, by the time the marble quarries of Carrara began to dominate the worlds of architecture and sculpture, the motives for carving stone had become complicated. What was being immortalized by artists was not only a noble face that needed to be remembered by citizens gathered in a piazza. It was not only a parable that needed to be recalled by worshippers standing humbly in the shadows of a great cathedral. What was being caught, what artists were rescuing from the relentless stream of the temporal, was beauty itself. This is what sculptors—“from Renaissance masters,” said Morrow, “to the most wild of our young modernists”—look for in their labour. “Beauty is what they hope to preserve in the myriad varieties of our marble.”
Morrow let this settle in. His face was tanned. He smelled pleasantly of tobacco and shaving soap.
“They change what is ordinary—and what is more ordinary than stone?—into what is divine.”
But the Bartons were puzzled.
“Myriad?” Argue asked.
“Isn’t Carrara marble … well, Carrara marble?” his wife added. She pointed as she spoke to the white, weathered stone that told the story of the young Roman consul.
“Oh, my no,” said Julian Morrow. His laughter boomed. He took some delight in its effect on his audiences.
“These mountains are like sculpture,” Morrow continued. “Their surface is only the most recent exposure of an intent far beyond our capacity to understand. And we regard the evidence of eternity as we would the marks left by a chisel in an unfinished piece of stone. These are glimpses of something beyond us. Something passing from a past too distant to comprehend to future eons we cannot hope to fathom. What was the Lord thinking when he set the forces of geology into motion that created marble? What was Michelangelo thinking when, with chisel in hand, he first glimpsed the possibilities of his own genius?”
Morrow was an experienced enough public speaker to recognize long before it became a problem that he was losing the thread of where all this was going. He paused—but his confident stance seemed to insist that this was not because he’d lost whatever point he thought he was making.
He smiled at his tendency to get carried away.
“One thing, you say? Marble? No. Here, there is no single marble. There is: Statuario, Ordinario, Bianco Carrara, Bianco P, Calacatta Cremo, Arabescato Classico. The list goes on. And on. There are scores of different varieties of Carrara marble.”
Julian Morrow
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