Pentelic marble

“ The inner one of three courses, as well as the whole superstructure, is formed of Pentelic marble of a compact crystalline structure and of dazzling whiteness. Long exposure has not availed to destroy its lustre, but only to soften its tone. The visitor, planting himself at the western front, is in a position to gain some adequate idea of the perfection of the noble building. ”

“ He considers it “unreasonable to suppose that the ancients entirely concealed, or even materially altered in appearance, the general surface of the white marble, which they made a great point of obtaining whenever possible; but that no one who has witnessed the painfully dazzling effect of fresh Pentelic marble under the Athenian sun will deny the artistic value of toning down the almost pure white of its polished surface, and the more so when considerable portions of the architecture were painted in the most positive colours. ”

“ Such are all those works in architectural decoration, in which absolute whiteness and uniformity of colour, are not only unnecessary, but from their dazzling effect even injurious. The subdued tone and slight air of antiquity given to this marble by its stained and unequal colour would in these works render it of the greatest use. Its durability for the purposes of interior architecture must also be equal to that of Carrara, although there is little doubt that when exposed to the action of the weather it would like the Pentelic be liable to corrosion in those parts which abound in mica. ”

“ When we consider the brilliancy of Pentelic marble when fresh worked, there appears a reason for using colours beyond that of imitating the usages of Attica, in more ancient temples, namely, that the minutiæ of the work in many parts would have been lost to the eye amidst the general brilliancy. ”

“ The mountains of Attica are chiefly calcareous. The best marble was obtained from Mt. Pentelicus, which supplied inexhaustible materials for the public buildings and statues of Athens. The Pentelic marble is of a dazzling white colour, hard, and fine-grained; but, owing to the little pieces of quartz or flint imbedded in it, not easy to work. Hymettus also produced fine marble: it is not so brilliantly white as the Pentelic, and in some places is almost grey. ”

“ He feels that there is “some slight ground of evidence that a peculiar yellow tinge upon some parts of the columns, especially of the west front of the Parthenon, is not simply the yellow said to result from the oxidation of iron contained in Pentelic marble, but has been applied externally as a tint, though perhaps so delicately as merely to reduce the high light of the marble without obscuring its crystalline character.” ”

“ No altar or shrine or image: there is no god but God. No carving or lattice-work: but the simple pillars and arches, the few cupolas and domes, are yet the richest of ornamentation. No paint or gems—only the clear harmonious veining of the marble. Only space and proportion, form and whispers of colour—and it is so beautiful that you can hardly breathe for rapture. The radiant marble ripples from shade to shade—snow-white, pearl-white, ivory-white—till it seems half alive. The bells and pinnacles are so light that they seem to float in the air. ”

“ No man will attempt to polish the sponge, or paint a picture on the vacant air, or rear a stone cathedral on a sunset cloud. There is no lily-bloom without the sustaining stalk, nor magnolia grandiflora without the sturdy and stately tree. "Wood, hay, stubble," are not fit materials for jewelry; but "gold, silver, precious stones," may be wrought into a thousand forms of beauty, sparkling with myriad splendors. The solid marble superstructure resting upon its deep foundations of granite, firm as the seated hills, can scarcely be too finely finished or too sumptuously adorned. ”

“ Each slab of white marble is wrought in rich tracery in the most delicate manner, pierced through and through so as to be the same when seen from either side; the pattern of each slab differs from the next one, and the rich variety, as well as beauty of the designs, fixes the attention of the beholder in amazement at the taste and patient skill that could originate and execute this vision of beauty, which seems like an imagination rising before the fancy, and then, by some wondrous wand of power, transmuted into a solid form forever, to be touched, and examined, and admired. ”

“ If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture, frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or inlay it with other coloured marbles as they did in Venice. Otherwise you had better build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence and with some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. ”

“ The world has nothing else like the Pantheon. So grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here ”

“ But for that great architect, the cathedral of Moulins—and how many other beautiful French churches?—would long ago have tumbled to pieces, been handed over as storage to corn merchants, or brewers! Is it so much more difficult to restore a marble effigy, whether of human being or animal, than a façade or an altar-piece? If impossible, then, I say, let broken marbles like those of Souvigny be hidden from view. ”

“ Although, compared with the life-warm, mobile face of a friend, the marble is cold and pulseless and unresponsive, yet it is beautiful to my hand. Its flowing curves and bendings are a real pleasure; only breath is wanting; but under the spell of the imagination the marble thrills and becomes the divine reality of the ideal. Imagination puts a sentiment into every line and curve, and the statue in my touch is indeed the goddess herself who breathes and moves and enchants. ”

“ And then, as one draws near to the church, it is easy to understand rather better than at first in what its real charm lies; this is no doubt before anything else in its beautiful colour; the whole front is shafted to a greater extent than almost any building I know, the shafts all rather heavy, but of marble of the richest kind; the groining of the seven entrance arches is filled with mosaics, and the walls are encrusted everywhere with marble. ”

“ This is more intensely black than any of our modern marbles; it is extremely scarce, occurring only in sculptured pieces. The red antique marble, Egyptum of the ancients, and Rosso antico of the Italians, is a beautiful marble of a deep blood-red colour, interspersed with white veins and with very minute white dots, as if strewed over with grains of sand. ”

“ The more colors are used for the drawn marble, the less of each color except black should be thrown on the size. Although the colors have been adapted to each other in regard to their power of expansion before using them, it is indispensable in producing these marbles with such a large [132] number of colors to assist the expansion of one color or the other by a few drops of ox-gall. ”

“ This marble is the most difficult of all to work, because it is the hardest; it is particularly difficult to fashion the more delicate forms in it without the chisel damaging or cracking them; if you do manage, though after much effort, to bring them off in this stone, they look lovely. I have found that the grain gradually softens through the five different sorts above-mentioned, & the softest of all I have found verging in colour to a delicate flesh tint rather than a white. This sort is the most cohesive, the most beautiful and the tenderest marble in the world to work in. ”

“ When newly constructed, the Roman temples in the time of the emperors must have been oppressive, reflecting the hot sunshine from their snowy cellæ and pillared porticoes with an insufferable glare. Marble—unlike sandstones, clay-slates, and basalts, which are kindred to the earth and the elements, and find themselves at home in any situation, all things making friends with them, mosses, lichens, ivies—is a dead, cold material, and does not harmonise with surrounding circumstances. ”

“ The twisted shafts of the upper stage of the Ducal Palace, and the triple and chevroned shafts of the Ca’ d’Oro, are not improvements upon the refinement of the earlier mode.
I have already spoken of the exquisite beauty of the inlaid marbles in S. Mark’s; nothing can be better than their effect, and nothing seems more wonderful than that they should not have been used more frequently in later buildings. I was, perhaps, a little disappointed in not finding, as I had expected, the marble arranged generally in geometrical patterns ”

“ The delicate mellowness of the antique marble admirably mocked the tint of human flesh;—a tropical glow, a golden warmth seemed to fill the motionless miracle—this dream of love frozen into marble by a genius greater than Praxiteles ”

“ And though every palace in Europe owes part of its decoration to variegated marbles, and nearly every woman in Europe part of her decoration to pieces of jasper or chalcedony, I do not think any geologist could at this moment with authority tell us either how a piece of marble is stained, or what causes the streaks in a Scotch pebble. ”

“ Among the most celebrated marbles of the ancient world was the rosso antico, or red antique. Its color passes from a red, almost scarlet, to a wine-lees or blood-red, which is divided by parallel layers of white, and sometimes also intersected by a network of delicate black veins. Its variation in tint is probably according to the quantity of the oxide of iron contained in it. Until lately this marble was known only through its remains, and it has generally been ascribed to Egypt. ”

“ The splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in Christendom. ”

“ With these are contrasted the pale primrose tints of the Corinthian pilasters and a cornice of white-veined Italian marble. Opposite the windows, and in corresponding positions at the ends of the rooms, are panels of the dark-veined Bardiglio Italian marble, the exact size of the windows. 341The stylobate and the styles and pilasters of the second story show the same tints and variety of marbles which mark the first. But the panels are of Sarran Golum marble, from the Pyrenees. The latter is one of the rarest of marbles; at a distance, of a blood-red hue. ”

“ We stand on the banks beside fluted columns of snow-white marble, and see broken marble everywhere near. That man who ploughs on the southern ridge of the sand turns up marble bits at every step of his bullocks, and the girls behind him, who are planting, uncover stones from the temple at almost every stroke of their hoes. ”

“ These galleries are supported by the most precious columns which ancient art could afford: among them eight shafts of green marble, from the Temple of Diana, at Ephesus; eight of porphyry, from the Temple of the Sun, at Baalbek; besides Egyptian granite from the shrines of Isis and Osiris, and Pentelican marble from the sanctuary of Pallas Athena. Almost the whole of the interior has been covered with gilding, but time has softened its brilliancy, and the rich, subdued gleam of the walls is in perfect harmony with the varied coloring of the ancient marbles. ”

“ Each square of glass has the leaf gold 142 upon its surface protected by another thin film of glass above it, so that no time or weather can affect its lustre, until the pieces of glass are bodily torn from their setting. The smooth glazed surface of the golden ground is washed by every shower of rain, but the marble usually darkens into an amber color in process of time; and when the whole ornament is cast into shadow, the golden surface, being perfectly reflective, refuses the darkness, and shows itself in bright and burnished light behind the dark traceries of the ornament. ”

“ In a marble country one should be always more and more astonished at the exquisite colour and structure of marble; in a slate country one should feel as if every rock cleft itself only for the sake of being built with conveniently.
Plate X.—Marble Masonry in the Duomo of Verona.
[Pg 377]
152. Now, for sculpture, there are, briefly, two materials—Clay, and Stone; for glass is only a clay that gets clear and brittle as it cools, and metal a clay that gets opaque and tough as it cools. ”

“ XVIII. It is well known, that what is meant by a church's being built of marble is, in nearly all cases, only that a veneering of marble has been fastened on the rough brick wall, built with certain projections to receive it; and that what appear to be massy stones, are nothing more than external slabs.
Now, it is evident, that, in this case, the question of right is on the same ground as in that of gilding. If it be clearly understood that a marble facing does not pretend or imply a marble wall, there is no harm in it ”