Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara [Hardcover]

Eric Scigliano (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2005

No artist looms so large in Western consciousness and culture as Michelangelo Buonarroti, the most celebrated sculptor of all time. And no place on earth provides a stone so capable of simulating the warmth and vitality of human flesh and incarnating the genius of a Michelangelo as the statuario of Carrara, the storied marble mecca at Tuscany's northwest corner. It was there, where shadowy Etruscans and Roman slaves once toiled, that Michelangelo risked his life in dozens of harrowing expeditions to secure the precious stone for his Pietà, Moses, and other masterpieces.

Many books have recounted Michelangelo's achievements in Florence and Rome. Michelangelo's Mountain goes beyond all of them, revealing his escapades and ordeals in the spectacular landscape that was the third pole of his tumultuous career and the third wellspring of his art. Eric Scigliano brings this haunting place and eternally fascinating artist to life in a sweeping tale peopled by popes and poets, mad dukes and mythic monsters, scheming courtiers and rough-hewn quarrymen. In showing how the artist, land, and stone transformed one another, Scigliano brings fresh insight to Michelangelo's most cherished works and illuminates his struggles with the princes and potentates of Carrara, Rome, and Medici Florence, who raised intrigue to a high art. He recounts the saga of the David, the improbable masterpiece that Michelangelo created against all odds, of the twin Hercules that he tried to erect beside it, and of the Salieri-like nemesis who snatched away the commission, turning a sculptural testament to liberty into a bitter symbol of tyranny and giving Florence the colossus it loves to hate.

Scigliano plumbs the Renaissance archives, uncovering previously unpublished and untranslated documents, and trolls the earthy cantinas of Carrara, where old cavatori who wrestled giant blocks from the mountains by hand recount the miseries and glories of a vanishing heroic age. He takes readers along with another sojourner, the exiled poet Dante Alighieri, who drew his visions of Hell and Purgatory partly from the surreal panorama of Carrara's quarries. Interweaving art, architecture, science, politics, folklore, and even quarry cuisine, he traces the mystique of marble and the magic of the stone carver's art from prehistory to the present, and shows how they culminate in the triumph and tragedy of Michelangelo's Pygmalion-like quest to bring life out of stone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Levi Strauss and denim, Michelangelo and the Carrara quarries go together. As early as 1497, the Italian sculptor traveled there to acquire blocks of stunning white marble, thought to be the purest in the world, and over the next two decades he made several more trips, staying for as long as eight months at a time. From this marble, Michelangelo wrought the Pietá, David, Moses and the statuary of Pope Julius II's tomb. Scigliano's book is a sort of retrace-the-footsteps-of-Michelangelo journey through the Carrara quarries, present and past. Sprawling and garrulous, the book covers every little detail of both Michelangelo's history with the marble and Scigliano's own connection to it (his great-great-grandfather was a Carrara quarryman). Scigliano squeezes in presentations of marble arcana, conversations with today's cavatori, readings of Michelangelo's poems, mini-lessons in geology and language, accounts of the Sistine Chapel cleaning and the Vermont granite workers' strikes, and analysis of the impact of WWII on Tuscany—but his narrative isn't strong enough to hold the mix together convincingly. Clearly a labor of love, and perhaps of filial piety as well, the volume is exhaustive —an upward climb for the reader. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The mountains above Carrara, Italy, represent a cradle of Western culture. The marble quarried from that craggy spot is responsible for much of what we think about great art and "beauty, order, and civilization," as Scigliano writes. Carrara is the source of the purest, whitest marble, and no one saw the luminescent genius in the stone more clearly than Michelangelo Buonarroti, carver of David, Moses, and the Pieta. Scigliano combines art history with a personal quest: a great-grandfather toiled in Carrara as a stonecutter, or scalpellino. In his encyclopedic approach, he covers every conceivable aspect of the world of stone and Michelangelo's art-making. Language, landscape, the aesthetics of color, the competitive spirit (with Donatello and Leonardo, among others), the politics of placement, and the perils of conservation--these only begin to recount the themes Scigliano touches on. So Michelangelo, as subject or character, doesn't have much room to breathe. Yet, for those seeking a solid rendering of the artist and his medium, Scigliano recounts the artist's large life and lasting works with care and reverence. Steve Paul
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First edition. edition (August 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743254775
• ISBN-13: 978-0743254779
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,178,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genre-crossing, discipline-crossing masterpiece, September 12, 2005

By 

E. B. Brinkley (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara (Hardcover)

All of the people who think "Michelangelo" when they think of the Renaissance should read this work by a "Renaissance man" himself, Eric Scigliano, environmental journalist, humorist, art aficianado, and regular contributor to Harper's, Discover, and other magazines. I read his last book, "Love, War, and Circuses," which brought the world and land of the Asian elephant so alive I felt as if I were on his harrowing adventures with him, and have been seeking out his articles ever since. Both the layman and the expert alike will be fascinated by one of the few real prose stylists in journalism to write a part-biography, part-"reporter's notebook" account of Michelangelo, the city of Cararra (the third pole of Michelangelo's artistic endeavors, and no less important than Florence in the development of his masterpieces), and the rare, wondrous, "living" marble from that fascinating source of masterpieces the world over. Don't be distracted by the geological sidenotes or short discussions of the artists' tools; in Michelangelo's first appearance it is as if he walked up to a group of wiry, spry stone carvers and this journalist/artist/poetry translator, said hello, and joined them, as alive as ever, to admire the "mountain," a glistening white cliff of fossilized sea shells (you can't get much more alive, for stone, than being made out of the backs of ocean-dwellers, as marble is).

A passionate writer on a passionate subject, Scigliano's love for the artist and his sunlit-snow-like inspiration is "alive" on every page (and I learned enough about the Renaissance to wax intelligent at parties on neoplatonism, Michelangelo's own poetry, and the Umberto-eco-like intrigues of the patronage system, just in the first 50 pages!). You will never look at the "David," or a marble bathroom counter, in quite the same way. Scigliano is a huge talent.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MEMORABLE WORK, September 7, 2005

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara (Hardcover)

Of the millions of people who have stood in line waiting at Florence's Galleria dell' Academia di Belle Arte to see the incomparable statue of David by Michelangelo, I wonder how many thought about the marble with which the artist worked. Very few, I'd imagine. Yet the story of the marble quarries of Carrara is as dramatic as many of the beautiful pieces wrought from their stone. Eric Scigliano, whose ancestors were quarrymen and stone carvers in Carrara, relates the fascinating story of Michelangelo's search for the stone he wanted, his continuing relationship with the city where he found it, and that city today.

Only recently the 17-foot-tall statue of David was restored, and the world was reminded of its beauty. Scigliano reminds us of the risks taken by quarrymen and by Michelangelo himself as they worked together to find the perfect stone, one that would do justice to Michelangelo's vision. The artist's quest is set among the machinations and maneuvering of Renaissance Rome, Florence, and Carrara, a compelling story in itself.

Readers will learn that there is over 2,000 years of "extractive industry" in Carrara, and it continues today. During his lifetime, Michelangelo probably spent two years there, first arriving in 1498 to find the stone for the Pieta. In regard to the San Lorenzo Church facade, there was all but open warfare between the Carrara marble masters and the Medici rulers in Rome and Florence.

Author Scigliano researched assiduously, laboriously searching Renaissance archives and often deciphering documents that had not been translated before. The result is a memorable work, one that will fascinate not only art lovers and historians but all.

- Gail Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara, November 25, 2007

By 

Awtumleef "JonApps" (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara (Hardcover)

An early reference to marble work in Lee, Massachusetts caught my attention and drew me deep into this unique and fascinating account of the marble quarries that provided the raw material for the genius that we all now know as Michelangelo. I glimpsed the quarries from a train window on a trip to Italy a year ago, mistakening them for snow at first, and it's an amazing sight. I highly recommend this book - the stone that inspired the Rennaissance is still there and this story of the mountains of marble is told with a passion that reflects the emotion of those times. A great read.