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Dr. Harris: We're going to talk about the process
of stone carving, which I think is very hard to imagine
without power tools and also the process of getting
the stone from a quarry.
Dr. Drogin: This is one of the marble quarries
in Carrara, Italy, which is where most
of the finest marble for sculpture,
especially in the Renaissance came from and still,
as you can see, they do quarry marble from this area.
Dr. Harris: And didn't Michelangelo get his marble
from Carrara?
Dr. Drogin: That's right.
This is where Michelangelo liked to get his marble,
because of its very pure white qualities.
You can see today they do use some power tools
and electric things like a bulldozer, but at the time,
the way it would work is that the very first step
would be to dislodge a block of marble from the marble
in the mountain and that would be done
by creating cracks in the area that you wanted
to get the block from and then inserting wooden wedges
that were soaked in water.
As the water would cause the wood to expand,
that is actually strong enough to crack the marble
and it would dislodge a large marble block.
Dr. Harris: So you have this wooden peg
that's going into a crack and being saturated with water
that makes the crack open more.
Dr. Drogin: Right, so you put a whole series of pegs
along a line and that'll create a large crack
that will dislodge the block.
Dr. Harris: Then removing that block from the cliff
and then somehow getting it to Florence.
Dr. Drogin: Actually, some of the first work,
in terms of shaping the stone, might actually be done
at the quarry.
Dr. Harris: Oh.
Dr. Drogin: That way you're not transporting
extra weight, since it's, of course, very hard to move.
You might shape it down, block it down
to it's general shape and then you might transport it
in that way.
Dr. Harris: That makes sense.
Dr. Drogin: For this reason, sometimes sculptors,
like Michelangelo actually started doing work
on the sculpture in the quarry or in the town
where the quarry was.
Dr. Harris: Was this transported by river?
Dr. Drogin: That's right, they usually tried
to transport these things by boat.
Rivers and canals, because of course,
the blocks being so heavy, it's easier to do it that way
than over land.
Let's talk about the process and some of the tools
that would be used.
As we said, the first step is you get a block
out of the mountain.
Then the next step is that you want to shape
the block down to the general shape of the sculpture
that you're making.
Here's the tools.
These are modern tools, but they're essentially
the same as the tools that were use in the Renaissance.
The first step, as I said, is to just get the shape
of the figure and for that, you're going to use the tool
that looks just like a giant pick, which is this one
right here.
You're going to use that with a large mallet,
a sledgehammer, and all you're doing is cutting away
the extra marble that you're not going to use.
You're just getting the general shape of the sculpture.
Dr. Harris: What would happen if you hacked at it
and something cracked in a way and took off a big slice
that you didn't want?
Dr. Droging: Then generally, you would start again.
Dr. Harris: That would be very bad, right?
Dr. Drogin: Right, exactly.
There's no going backwards with marble carving,
since it is a reductive process.
You do need to be very, very careful.
As I said, you start by getting the general shape
and then once you've got the general shape
of the figure or whatever it is that you're carving,
then you'll switch down to these chisels that have teeth,
starting with a larger one, like you see here.
That you use with much more delicate taps
and a smaller hammer that gives you more control
to get the more details that you want from the figure.
As you need more and more details, you move
to finer and finer a chisel.
A very good example of what this looks like,
since we already started talking about Michelangelo
we can use this example.
This is Michelangelo's incomplete figure
of the Awakening Slave, one of the figures
that was planned for the tomb
of Pope Julius the Second.
This dates from around 1530.
Here you can see the block that the figure
is being carved from.
What you can see, especially in some details,
is that the very large rough area surrounding the figure,
that's what Michelangelo had started to chop away.
He's just using a pick and a hammer and you can see
these marks in here are not made with a refined chisel.
He's basically just whacking away at this marble,
because he just wants it to go away.
Dr. Harris: I imagine Michelangelo had big muscles
in his arms from doing this.
Dr. Drogin: You have to be very strong
to do this kind of thing.
Then what's really nice is, especially in this image,
if we look at the detail, for instance,
in what's the left arm of the figure on the right,
you can see here he's shifted to one of those chisels
that have teeth, because now he's not just trying
to get rid of the marble, he's actually trying to shape it
and to give it some kind of form.
If you look at the chest, you can see those kinds
of teethmarks there, but they're a little fainter
and a little smaller, because there he's getting
more detail and so he's switched to a chisel
with finer teeth.
Here's a detail of the face and again, you can see
the same different kinds of chisel marks
that we were talking about a minute ago.
These, which are just made with the pick to get rid
of the marble and then here, where it looks
like it's been scratched with a fork.
Those are the kinds of areas where he's using a chisel
with teeth to shape the figure some more.
Dr. Harris: I'm reminded of Leonardo saying
that sculpture was inferior because you had
to get all messy.
Dr. Drogin: It is messy.
You sweat, you get covered in dust.
It's a very sloppy process compared to -
Exactly and takes a lot of exertion compared to painting.
Dr. Harris: And of course a block of marble
was very expensive.
Dr. Drogin: Absolutely, that's right and it's important
when we're talking about marble, in terms of sculpture,
to think that marble costs ten times more than wood,
in terms of what the finish product will cost.
I also want to look at this detail again,
because besides talking about marble carving in general
this incomplete figure gives us a window
into Michelangelo's particular approach to sculpture,
because he said in his writings, he discusses
how when he's making a marble figure, he looks
at the block as soon as it's come out of the quarry
before he's even touched it with any chisel
and he visualizes the figure trapped inside the marble.
Essentially, he says, "All I'm doing is releasing
"the figure from inside the stone.
"It's already there, it's pre-existing in the stone itself
"and all I'm doing is setting it free, taking away
"all the marble that surrounds it."
Dr. Harris: So you can see the figure trapped inside.
Dr. Drogin: Exactly and this particular example
gives us a really good illustration of that idea,
because in a way, it looks like the figure
is already all there and all he's doing is letting it out.
Dr. Harris: Getting rid of all that dead material
to let a living figure free.
Dr. Drogin: That's right.
Now, of course, as we said, this is an incomplete figure.
This is not a finished sculpture by Michelangelo,
but -
Dr. Harris: He did that a lot.
Dr. Drogin: There was a lot of sculptures (crosstalk)
Dr. Harris: Given the process, why one would leave them
incomplete.
It's so difficult, they would take so long,
and he had patrons making so many demands on him.
Dr. Drogin: That's right, but luckily, in a way,
we have different sculptures at a lot of different stages
of incompletion, so we can really see
how he progressed along the way.
To switch to a different sculpture, this is the so-called
Doni Tondo from about 1505.
Here again, you can see the different kinds
of chisel marks.
For instance, rougher, coarser ones here on the chest,
much finer ones on the face where he started to get
much more detail.
What I really want to emphasize, though,
is that when Michelangelo's sculptures
were actually complete, in other words
when they were signed and on public display,
like the famous Pieta in Rome from the 1490s,
they had an incredibly high polish.
There were no more chisel marks at all,
because you progress through the finer and finer chisels
but then the last stages are going to be
that you've sanded down and then also that you polish it
with leather, so it gets this very, very pristine, glossy,
smooth finish.
When you're looking at something like this,
it's hard to imagine even that it was carved
with a hammer and tools.
Dr. Harris: It is.
Dr. Drogin: Look at the flesh or the fabric on her head.
It seems to transcend the medium.
Dr. Harris: So there are really two kinds
of sculpting processes.
One is an additive process, right, of sculpting
from clay or wax or plaster and this would be
a subtractive process of taking away.
Dr. Drogin: That's right.
These examples that we've looked at have given us
a really good idea of how you progress
from the mountain to the finished work of art.
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