7 hours ago
3
When we think of marble, we think of it as a desirable commodity: of luxurious interior decoration, from deluxe kitchens to the most corporate of foyers – and of a roaring global market. Yet in the centuries prior to the enlightenment brought about by science and the birth of geology, marble captured the popular imagination as a mysterious, living structure with spiritual properties.
It is a way of thinking that’s alien from today’s knowledge, informed by the comfortable conclusions of empirical science: we know marble is a metamorphic rock created millions of years ago under extreme pressure and heat, deep below the Earth’s crust. In his new book, Divine Presence, creative director, author and one-time Wolfgang Tillmans muse Karl Kolbitz invites us to consider a pre-science mentality, when civilisations believed in the reality of miracles, dragons, astrology and the governance of an unknown but omnipresent divinity as a means of making sense of the world.
Medieval and renaissance art is built upon an extensive iconography, filled with symbolism that can be perplexing to a casual viewer unfamiliar with such tropes as pomegranate = fertility or pelican = sacrifice. And that’s before we even get to saints and their identifying attributes. Yet no prior knowledge is needed to notice that the depiction of marble within paintings exists outside this lexicon, often not adhering to the perspectival arrangement around it, and ranging from approximating the patterns of porphyry to the trippiest, most abstract faux-marble swirls in supernatural colour. A little-studied area of art history, Kolbitz zones in on this curious pictorial treatment of solid rock as a unique embodiment of medieval and Renaissance thinking and spirituality.
In Greco-Roman and medieval science, divinity permeated all matter, including stone, and its propensity to liquefy and solidify persisted in popular thought for much longer. Kolbitz lists marble’s etymology from the Latin noun “marmor”, which itself derives from the Greek verb “marmairein” or “to glisten”. Aristotle considered marble to be the solidification of the living planet’s “breath” or vapours. Theories abounded, from Vitruvius’s suggestion that the Earth actively generates marble at a perceptible rate, to astrological and alchemic ideas about precious stones that led one bishop in Brittany to suggest that ingesting lapis lazuli could cure excessive sweating, aid escape from prison or reconcile sinners to God. These are but few examples of a breadth of imaginative thinking that associates mysticism and divine power with materials.
Kolbitz identifies compelling instances in which the depiction of marble is exempt from pictorial rules, precisely because it evoked transcendence from mere earthly solidity. Zanobi Strozzi’s Annunciation (1440-45) features a wildly abstract marble floor that’s startlingly at odds with the controlled treatment of its figures and architecture. Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation (c 1467-69) depicts solid blue marble in the space delineating sky, evoking hard earth and heaven at once. Even in paintings that have been studied extensively, we are directed to often-overlooked aspects of marble: the fictive pattern suggesting the blood-red morbidity of the incumbent Christ’s body in Mantegna’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (c 1483); the mimicking of “book-matching”, in which cut marble is deliberately arranged to create a desired pattern, in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel (c 1303-05).
Particularly fascinating is the practice of painting versos (the back of a picture) as fictive marble – raising the humble wood base material into a pseudo-precious item, just as books and reliquaries were adorned with gems. Kolbitz mimics the idea by binding his cloth-covered book lavishly with a gilded top edge, and selecting the verso of Albrecht Dürer’s Christ as the Man of Sorrows (c 1492-93) for its cover, commenting that it is “a spectacular example … because both sides of these objects were venerated, so the versos could function as meditations on the divine creation, Christ’s suffering and resurrection, or luminous visions of paradise”.
It is telling that the idea for this book originated during research for Kolbitz’s previous work, which collected photographs of entryways in Milan – many of which feature gorgeous marbles. Sitting apart from specific iconography or the use of grisaille – the trompe l’oeil illusion of marble in a pictorial scene – the practice of painting marble pattern offered artists the opportunity to evoke gateways to something else, be it the cosmos or divinity. Part of marble’s attractiveness is how it straddles the legible and illegible. The eye is drawn to its patterns and simultaneously confused by its emulation of natural chaos.
after newsletter promotion
As such, the book is not an academic survey that chronologically traces development. It promotes left-field thinking about the attitudes towards and beliefs around marble by a variety of artists – and how people in a secular, science-dictated society, or without knowledge of art, can find beauty and inspiration in the materials of the world. “We are far removed from the realities of people living in the 14th and 15th centuries,” Kolbitz writes. “On the other hand, traces of their ways of thinking still persist in contemporary life,” he adds, citing the continuing fascination with crystals, stones and stars, and “the influence of celestial bodies on our lives”.
With the book, he encourages readers to “turn their attention to subjects that are right in front of our eyes, yet have largely gone unnoticed … things that, once pointed out, seem almost obvious, but which until then remained overlooked”. Perhaps it will make us think more deeply next time we cross a marbled entryway.
English (US) ·