Marble

“ But for the inside of a building marble is the richest material you have for the production of lovely color music without words—painted as it is by Nature's hand, with every tint and tone of delicacy and subtleness, and enlivened, too, by the wildest caprices of beauty. ”

“ Then childlike artist grown
He craved for form, and from the shapes around
Contorted fair the figure of himself,
Moulded his deities in wood and stone
Around his bed, his banquet board, his tomb
As yet a bungler, but when youth infused
Into the sap and marrow of his brain
The vernal subtleties of love, he dreamed
Of gods as fair as he himself would be,
Majestic, abstract, yet with solid power
To make a goddess tremble; and behold,
Under the yearning passion of his thought
The embryonic marble sloughed its shell,
And gods of strength and beauty trod the earth,
Their foreheads high in heaven. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above us rises the lofty dome, far up into the dim distance. The floor on which we tread is of polished marble and jasper, ornamented with a wainscoating of sculptured marble tablets inlaid with flowers formed of precious stones. ”

“ The pallor of the marble countenance, the swelling of the marble bosom, the very purity of the marble feet, we behold suddenly flushed over with a tide of ungovernable crimson; and a slight shudder quivers about her delicate frame, as a gentle air at Napoli about the rich silver lilies in the grass. ”

“ 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. [15] 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. ”

“ The marble is pliant at her magic touch, and seems to breathe a pious life. The chiselled stone is instinct with a living soul, and stands there, silent, yet full of hymns and prayers; an embodied aspiration, a thought with wings that mock at space and time. ”

“ It is wrong to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp snow wreath. ”

“ Passing in at the portal, the spectator is amazed at the vast mass of elegant columns of marble, porphyry, verd antique, agate, and other elegant stone, superb mosaics, gilding and ornament in profusion that meet his view on every side. ”

“ Not far off we see another youth at work on a block of marble, similar in every detail to the first. The tools with which he plies his labor differ in no wise from those of the worker we have been following.
The glory of the morning shines upon the marble. Glowing with enthusiasm, the light of a high purpose illuminating his face, the sculptor, with steady hand and eye, begins to work out his ideal. The vision that flits before him is so beautiful that he almost fears the cunning of his hand will be unequal to fashioning it from the rigid mass before him. ”

“ Marble, too, takes on the warm golden tint of the sunset, and is stained by time with a russet hue that brings it into partnership with the common rocks, with which all things make friends—the mosses, the lichens, the vines and birds. ”

“ The beauty and expression of ancient sculpture, whether for outside or inside decoration, were greatly heightened by this tinting. In cases where it was not employed, Nature herself became the artist, and has burnt into the marble statue or the marble pillar the warm hue of life; and the rusty, withered look of the ruins, over which ages of change have passed, touches us more than the pure white marble structure could have done in the pride of its splendour, and appeals to the tenderest sympathies of beings who see in themselves, and in all around them, the tokens of death and decay. ”

“ You grow fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Built round a garden, its marble courts and unnumbered galleries formed a trackless maze through which they could never have found their way without the aid of the wizard's map. As they trod the marble floors they paused many times to view the matchless carvings on the silver doors, which told anew the beautiful old stories of love triumphant. ”

“ All is in white marble, and the sculpture is of exquisite delicacy: foliage, figures of every description are there in lavish profusion. The pillars are coupled, some twisted, some plain. The very bases are enriched with ornament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the great steeple—surmounting the myriad of spires—inside of the spires—over the doors, the windows—in nooks and corners—every where that a niche or a perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base, there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself! ”

“ A spectator of the scene might have well imagined that some mighty spell was in operation, by which the order of nature had been reversed:—while the marble glowed with more than human passion, the living man was colder than stone! ”

“ It is built wholly of marble, and overlaid, inside and out, with florid ornaments of exquisite beauty. There are no flying buttresses, no pinnacles, no deep and fretted doorways, such as form the charm of French and English architecture; but instead of this, the lines of party-coloured marbles, the scrolls and wreaths of foliage, the mosaics and the frescoes which meet the eye in every direction, satisfy our sense of variety, producing most agreeable combinations of blending hues and harmoniously connected forms. ”

“ He led the way through a labyrinth of cloisters, gloomy as the grave; till ordering a grated door to be thrown open, the light of our flambeaux fell upon a flight of most beautiful marble steps, polished as a mirror, leading down between walls of the rarest jaspers to a portal of no great size, but enriched with balusters of rich bronze, sculptured architraves, and tablets of inscriptions, in a style of the greatest magnificence. ”

“ Far from weighing them down, the marble that envelops them throws about them the charm of the indeterminate and by means of this unites them with the atmosphere. The parts that are wholly disengaged enable one to divine those that remain hidden; they are veiled without being obliterated, like mountain-tops among the clouds; and this half-mystery, instead of diminishing, increases the harmony of the bodies trembling with life under their mantle of stone. ”

“ It may be likened to a block of marble raised out of the quarry—rough and rude in outline, massive in solidity and strength, but giving no indication of the grace into which it will grow under the hand of the sculptor. What art effects upon the marble block, Nature accomplishes upon the surface of the land. ”

“ This consists of rectangular expanses of polished marble where the light rests with a soft, milky splendour. One would never imagine that so simple a thing as surface could be so beautiful when it is large and pure. ”

“ It is a vast marble collonaded corridor extending around a great unoccupied square of ground; its broad floor is marble, and on every slab is an inscription—for every slab covers a corpse. On either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments, tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full of grace and beauty. They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect, every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish ”

“ For not only are whole walls now covered with marble, but the marble itself is carved out or marqueted so as to represent objects and animals of various kinds. No longer now are we satisfied with formal compartitions of marble, or with slabs extended like so many mountains in our chambers, but we must begin to paint the very stone itself! ”

“ Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the marble—speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work—as he indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. ”

“ Let us imagine two pieces of marble placed side by side, the one rough and inartistic, the other one fashioned by the sculptor's chisel, who made of it the statue of a goddess, a grace, or a muse; or that of a man—but not that of any individual whatever, but that of a (cultured gentle) man in whom art would have gathered all the traits of beauty offered by different individuals. ”

“ While moulding the figure and features upon a scale almost heroic, nature had jealously guarded the symmetry of her work, and in addition to the perfect proportion of the statuesque outlines, had bestowed upon the firm white flesh a gleaming smoothness, suggestive of fine grained marble highly polished. ”

“ You who have never seen the like can scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then some one suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone. ”

“ The mixture of colours, the flowing grace of treatment, the blending of statuary with rare marbles, the exquisite easy manipulation, in times, too, before marble-machinery was known, all join to make it a most astonishing work. ”

“ This intermixture of the sweetest scented flowers and fruit trees, in a burying ground, among the finest pieces of sculptured marble, with evergreens growing over them, in the form of arbours, and furnished with seats, cannot fail to produce in the mind of the person who views it for the first time, peculiar and uncommon feelings of domestic melancholy, mingled with pleasing tenderness. ”

“ The enrichments of the surface, which is covered by beautiful groups set in a graceful framework of marble, with scarcely a flat or unadorned spot from top to bottom, has been ever since the admiration of artists and of the world. ”

“ Lines which are lovely in the pearly film of the Nautilus shell, are lost in the grey roughness of stone; and those which are sublime in the blue of far away hills, are weak in the substance of incumbent marble. ”

“ From a block of{103} marble he causes a woman to blossom forth like a flower, until rough block and figure appear of different materials—the one a cold, pulseless background, a sheath for a form so instinct with life that the stone has the texture of flesh, and seems to bloom and glow. ”

“ Only place your marble at the proper level, and twice a day you have the grand salubrious sparkling influx of ocean's self, self-filtered, and by its own operation permeated with a fine siliceous element. ”

“ Can the stories we have all been taught be true? Leaving beauty altogether out of the question, here you are in the midst of the wreck of one of the largest buildings you ever were in. You see that it was built of blocks of white marble; that the columns are formed of these blocks, each some four feet high, and so beautifully fitted together that at the distance of two thousand years you very often cannot find the joints, except where the marble is chipped. ”

“ Gold, painting, sculpture, the richest ornaments of all kinds, are distributed everywhere with prodigality but taste. The architecture is correct and admirable, the marble is most exquisite; jasper, porphyry, lapis, polished, wreathed, and fluted columns, with their capitals and their ornaments of gilded bronze, a row of balconies between each altar with little steps of marble to ascend them, and the cage encrusted ”