Marble pillar

“ But it is still as safe as if it had been cut yesterday, because the smooth round mass of the pillar is entirely undisturbed; into that, furrows are cut with a chisel as much under command and as powerful as a burin. The effect of the design is trusted entirely to the depth of these incisions—here dying out and expiring in the light of the marble, there deepened, by drill holes, into as [Pg 41] definitely a black line as if it were drawn with ink ”

“ COLUMN OF MARCUS AURELIUS.
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The shaft of this pillar is of precisely the same height as that of the Pillar of Trajan. The pedestal, on the other hand, is much higher, and rises considerably above the level of the modern pavement. The present marble facing of this pedestal has been employed to strengthen the foundations of the monument, which had been much injured. ”

“ We ascended to the second story; then to the third; and viewed its pillars, which are of yellow, green, grey, and variegated stone, and of marble of various beautiful and resplendent colours; also its marble tablets, reaching from pillar to pillar, with marks of crosses still to be traced upon them: as they are likewise upon its beautiful pavement, and all its stones and marbles ”

“ The Pillar is still standing on the Top of the second Hill; ’tis somewhat impair’d, not so much by Time, altho’ it is very ancient, as by Fires and Earthquakes, and Tempests. The Statue and the three upper Wreaths are gone, and in the Room of them there’s a plain round Superstructure, almost of the same Thickness and Size with the other Part of the Shaft. The Pedestal of it is made of squar’d Marble, and is, every Way, eleven Foot nine Inches broad, and eighteen Foot high. ”

“ On no occasion do they ever remove a stone that serves for a monument. Some of them are costly enough, being of very fine marble. They set up a pillar, with a carved turbant on the top of it, to the memory of a man; and as the turbants, by their different shapes, shew the quality or profession, 'tis in a manner putting up the arms of the deceased; besides, the pillar commonly bears an inscription in gold letters. The ladies have a simple pillar without other ornament, except those that die unmarried, who have a rose on the top of their monument. ”

“ Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble street, were marble pillars, the upper parts of which were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The material texture of this creation encloses a living impulse as a wall encloses a garden. One of the copies of this marble is in the possession of Eugène Carrière, and in the silent twilight of his house this stone pulsates like a spring in which there is an eternal motion, a rising and falling, a mysterious stir of an elemental force. A girl kneels, her beautiful body is softly bent backward, her right arm is stretched behind her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Up to the highest quarries the road is steep, and strewn with broken marble, and after that there is an hour's scramble through bushes and over a rocky path. From these quarries was hewn the marble for the Temple of Theseus, the Parthenon, the Propylæ, the theaters, and other public buildings, to which age has now given a soft and creamy tone; the Pentelic marble must have been too brilliant for the eye, and its dazzling luster was, no doubt, softened by the judicious use of color. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the majority of marbles those lines or spots that give to any stone its peculiar attractiveness are in reality flaws, and hence their presence must add greatly to the cost of working. It is safe to say that the beautiful breccia marble from the French Pyrenees, which has been used for wall-panels in the cash-room of the Treasury Building at Washington, would not be worked to any extent from quarries in this country, so long as the imported article can be obtained at present rates. ”

“ Where, on the other hand, marble is abundant and good, refinement is to be met with, for no other building material exists in which very delicate mouldings or very slight or slender projections maybe employed with the certainty that they will be effective. Where stone is scarce, brick buildings, with many arches, roughly constructed cornices and pilasters, and other peculiarities both of structure and ornamentation, make their appearance, as, for example, in Lombardy and North Germany. ”

“ DOOR-FRAME—STA. ANASTASIA.
canopies supported upon trefoiled arches resting on four marble shafts, with a kind of sarcophagus or an effigy beneath; or else, when attached to a wall, they have two detached shafts supporting the same kind of trefoiled arch and surmounted by a flattish pediment. Their effect is almost invariably beautiful in the extreme, and their only defect is, that they all require to be held together by rods of iron connecting the capitals of the columns. This, however, is soon forgotten when one feels that there is no pretence ever or anywhere at its concealment ”

“ Can you suggest something that is likely to prove agreeable to his cast of mind?’
‘Article him to a marble manufacturer,’ replied Geometrus eagerly; ‘it is the grandest trade going. We want marbles and granites for every building, nowadays; we cannot obtain enough of them. There is plenty of scope for further invention, for instance, porphyry has not yet been successfully imitated but in appearance only, for it is too brittle for any purpose necessitating strength and durability. A new “Stone Age” is dawning, for not a brick will be used save in the cottage of the poorest. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The six niches between the altars are each supported by two fluted pillars and a corresponding number of pilasters, the greater portion of them being composed of monoliths of that costly yellow marble frequently employed by the ancients. They are more than thirty-two feet in height, and, as regards size, are unique of their kind. It has been impossible, even for the ancients, to erect, of this rare material, all the pillars required for the embellishment of this splendid edifice, for which reason they were obliged to substitute six of pavonazzetto. ”

“ At the same time a similar movement goes on in the rock of the floor, and, where the rate of vibration is the same, the two kicks are coincident, and so the sphere is impelled violently away from the point of contact. Where the marble comes in contact with brick, in part because of the lesser elasticity of that material, due to its rather porous structure, and partly because it does not vibrate at the same rate as the marble, the expelling blow is much less strong. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The front wall of the hemicycle was now exposed in its eastern half; this was faced with slabs of porta santa marble, pilasters of africano, and a moulded plinth of white marble, whose blocks bear the Greek characters Τ, Δ, Ε, Ζ, Η, Θ, Κ; the omissions make it clear that the blocks were removed from some other building. A number of holes in the marble, some of which contain fragments of metal pins, show that bronze ornaments were at onetime attached to the facing. ”

“ The marble tower, again, is a great building, on which we devise devious slanting ways down which marbles run. I do not know why it is amusing to make a marble run down a long intricate path, and dollop down steps, and come almost but not quite to a stop, and rush out of dark places and across little bridges of card: it is, and we often do it. ”

“ It is wonderful to walk slowly about this marble, to follow the long line that curves about the richly unfolded roundness of the back to the face that loses itself in the stone as though in a great weeping, and to the hand which like a broken flower speaks softly once more of life that lies deep under the eternal ice of the block. ”

“ The wall is divided into two stages, by a bold string-course and double line of chevrons formed by recessing the brickwork and inserting panels of coloured and carved white marble. The lower stage is arcaded mainly in red brick, whilst the upper has a wall deeply recessed behind arcades under the eaves, with delicate balustrades between the columns which carry the arcades. This upper part of the building is mainly of buff-coloured bricks, with thin lines of red to mark the pattern of arches, and it is curious that the light bricks are much larger than the red. ”

“ I said the pavement was stone—it is all of marble. About it sat many flower-sellers, men in white, red and black robes with baskets heaped with orange-coloured marigolds, blue cornflowers, pink roses and scarlet poppies. The silver doors stand open, and through the white marble gateway a constant stream of people come and go along the causeway with its rows of golden lamps on short marble standards leading to the Golden Shrine itself in the middle of the water. ”

“ Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there. ”

“ In this form the marble is used for facing the walls of buildings upon a back of brick, giving all the effect of a solid wall of marble at much reduced cost. In the most expensive structures only are the walls built of solid blocks of marble or freestone. Marble slabs for mantels and other interior work are sawed like those for building, and are then rubbed smooth upon a heavy revolving table of cast iron, called the rubbing bed, and afterward polished.—According to the census of 1870, there were 22 marble quarries in operation in the United States, employing a capital of $1,316,600. ”

“ 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. ”