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National Geographic : 1982 Jul
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YOU MIGHT SAY it stuck out like a sore thumb .. but a thumb 16 feet high, weighing 25 metric tons, carved from fine white marble? Amid clouds of white dust kicked up by pneumatic chisels at his studio in Carrara, Italy, Carlo Nicoli explained: "It's by the modern French sculptor Ce sar. Thumbs are a specialty of his. This one was commissioned by a Saudi sheikh. Cesar made a plaster mold of the sheikh's thumb, then my artisans copied every whorl, every wrinkle." Nicoli's studio is one of those where sculptors send plaster models of their work to be scaled up and executed in stone. The thumb would decorate a boulevard in Jiddah (facing page). "Imagine," he said, "it took us 400 days just to reproduce the wrinkles." Days later I watched machines slice mar ble from the walls of Cervaiole, one of 225 active quarries near the world's marble capi tal, the city of Carrara. Many of the slabs would be shipped to Arab countries, the des tination of 50 percent of this marble these days. I envisioned all the cool, white build ings springing up in the desert: banks, air ports, palaces, ministries, private villas. "You know," said a man whose job it was to bulldoze the debris, "they will be taking marble from these mountains long after the oil has dried up." He was right, of course. The stone of Car rara has endured many empires. Iftoday's oil sheikhs see marble as the very metaphor of luxury, so did the ancient Romans, whose Emperor Augustus opened these quarries for large-scale exploitation during the first cen tury B.C. Reportedly, he boasted, "I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble"- eventually including imperial fo rums, Trajan's Column, and parts of the Pantheon, among other structures. Great artists long have been bewitched by the magic of Carrara marble. From this stone Michelangelo wrested his immortal "David," the tender "Pieta," and his fierce "Moses." Masters like Cellini, Donatello, della Robbia, Bernini, Canova, and, in our own day, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi have shaped enduring works from it. Carrara marble found its way into the ca thedrals of Florence and Siena, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the pavements of St. Peter's, Leningrad's Hermitage, the World Trade Center in New York City, Washington's Kennedy Center, and the staircases of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This classic stone marks the European graves of American soldiers killed in both World Wars. Copies of "David," the "Pie ta," and "Moses" sculptured from Carrara marble decorate that extravaganza of ceme teries, Forest Lawn in California. Las Vegas hotel lobbies are filled with it (one even boasts a marble Joe Louis, fists up). Statue or staircase, all began as a chunk of mountain in a 390-square-kilometer area in Tuscany's Apuan Alps (diagram, page 48), which last year yielded 1.3 million metric tons of marble from an almost inexhaustible supply. The region includes a string of such marble towns as Massa, Querceta, Sera vezza, and Pietrasanta. But it is Carrara, a city of 70,000, that is the best known and the economic heart of an area where 18,000 jobs revolve around a marble axis. And so, National Geographic,July 1982
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