From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Lopping a Large Chip off a Very Old Block
Anyone who doubts the power of art to inspire and provoke should consider the case of Italy's Monte Altissimo, which looms 5,000 feet above the remote Serra River Valley in the northwest corner of Tuscany. There, the Henraux firm, which has quarried Altissimo for 180-odd years, wants to shave some 300 feet off its southern ridge to exploit a large part of the mountain's shrinking lode of high-quality white marble. In the local debate that's ensued, Henraux plays the jobs card, threatening to lay off 20 workers if it can't level the mountaintop. Civic authorities, businesses and labor unions have voiced their support. Conservationists and officials of the regional park that embraces Altissimo and the other Apuan Alps protest that removing the ridge will ruin a spectacular vista and compromise a valuable nature preserve.
This would be a local issue, the sort that might play out anywhere industries seek to dig, mine, or log, if one more name didn't enter in: Michelangelo Buonarroti, a name the local quarriers have traded off for decades, but which the conservationists now invoke to support their case against quarrying. No artist resonates more in the popular imagination than the man known in his lifetime as "the divine Michelangelo." Even today he remains the defining, default image of creative accomplishment. Journalists habitually lean on him when they seek superlatives to describe their profile subjects, lauding each as "the Michelangelo" of (I've cataloged all these examples) meatcutting, pumpkin carving, Olympic swimming, sports promotion, molecule splicing--you name it.
And so the stakes have gotten higher at Monte Altissimo. "Michelangelo's Peak Sparks Dispute," one news service trumpets over a story reporting that the mountain that "provided the Renaissance sculptor with the raw material for masterpieces such as the Pietà" is on the chopping block. Italy's national press picked up the story. Antonio Paolucci, the former culture minister who directs Florence's museum system, weighed in, complaining that "pillaging" for marble had gone too far and the Apuan Alps should be "preserved as much as possible"--even though that pillaging produced the stone for Florence's cathedral and many of the masterworks Mr. Paolucci oversees. In July the international press began piling on, starting with Britain's Guardian.
But the Michelangelo connection that has put Monte Altissimo in the limelight is grounded in misinformation that infects even the venerable Henraux firm. Last year an earnest young Henraux representative insisted to me that Michelangelo carved his revered Vatican Pietà from Altissimo stone. Unfortunately, this popular tale has as much basis as the legends attributing crucifixes and saintly reliefs in various Apuan village churches, and even one Gothic rose window, to the great master. "Michelangelo carved here" is the local equivalent of "George Washington slept here."
The historical record, including Michelangelo's own abundant correspondence, shows clearly that he never took any marble from Monte Altissimo. He did open two quarries farther down the Serra gorge and nearly lost his life extracting enormous columns and blocks. But he never got to use any of them; the project for which they were intended, an overambitious façade for Florence's San Lorenzo Church, was aborted and his hard-won marble scattered and purloined.
This was the most bitter, frustrating period in Michelangelo's stormy life, made worse by the fact that he came unwillingly to the Serra basin. His Medici patrons were trying to develop new quarries there, to break nearby the monopoly that Carrara, a few miles to the north, held over the marble trade. Forced to sever his longstanding ties to Carrara, where he did find the stone for his Pietà and other masterpieces, Michelangelo got embroiled in a Renaissance trade war. This triggered a rivalry between Carrara and the town of Pietrasanta (in whose territory Monte Altissimo lay) that reverberates to this day.
Perhaps Monte Altissimo should be left standing as a memorial to Michelangelo's travails. But it's not certain he would appreciate the gesture. Scarcely any artist or poet showed less interest in the beauties of nonhuman nature than Michelangelo; what meager landscapes appear in his paintings look like desert wastes, or quarries. And he hardly viewed mountaintops as inviolate; in happier times, he dreamed of carving one of Carrara's peaks into a personal Mount Rushmore, a massive sculpture "visible to mariners far out at sea."
In a sense, the quarrymen of Carrara (including, by way of disclosure, some of my ancestors) have already done that on an outsized, abstract scale. After two millennia of hacking and blasting, the Apuan ridges--some terraced like Javan rice paddies, others cut sheer as skyscraper walls, and others whittled into blade-like edges--form the ultimate work of marble art, a panorama of ghastly ruin and beauty. The "glaciers" and "snowcaps" of white rubble that gleam year-round atop them are the largest trompe-l'oeil effect ever shaped by human hands.
But, Michelangelo aside, these mournful mountains have seen more than their share of picturesque devastation. Since he sought marble here, explosives, high-speed saws, and bulldozers have replaced hand picks and stone sleds in the quarries, displacing thousands of workers. What are 20 more jobs worth? Let this one prominent peak stand more or less intact, as a keepsake of the ravaged little range that has given the world so much beauty.
Mr. Scigliano is the author of "Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara," which the Free Press will publish in September.
