Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara »

Eric Scigliano's ancestors were quarry-men and stone carvers in Carrara. He is the author of Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans and two regional books, Seattle from the Air and Puget Sound: Sea Between the Mountains, and the co-translator of Trinh Công So'n's wartime poetry. An award-winning journalist, Scigliano has written for Harper's, Outside, Discover, and many other publications.

No artist looms so large in Western consciousness and culture as Michelangelo Buonarroti, the most celebrated sculptor of all time. And no place on earth provides a stone so capable of simulating the warmth and vitality of human flesh and incarnating the genius of a Michelangelo as the statuario of Carrara, the storied marble mecca at Tuscany's northwest corner. It was there, where shadowy Etruscans and Roman slaves once toiled, that Michelangelo risked his life in dozens of harrowing expeditions to secure the precious stone for his Pietà, Moses, and other masterpieces.

Many books have recounted Michelangelo's achievements in Florence and Rome. Michelangelo's Mountain goes beyond all of them, revealing his escapades and ordeals in the spectacular landscape that was the third pole of his tumultuous career and the third wellspring of his art. Eric Scigliano brings this haunting place and eternally fascinating artist to life in a sweeping tale peopled by popes and poets, mad dukes and mythic monsters, scheming courtiers and rough-hewn quarrymen. In showing how the artist, land, and stone transformed one another, Scigliano brings fresh insight to Michelangelo's most cherished works and illuminates his struggles with the princes and potentates of Carrara, Rome, and Medici Florence, who raised intrigue to a high art. He recounts the saga of the David, the improbable masterpiece that Michelangelo created against all odds, of the twin Hercules that he tried to erect beside it, and of the Salieri-like nemesis who snatched away the commission, turning a sculptural testament to liberty into a bitter symbol of tyranny and giving Florence the colossusit loves to hate.

Scigliano plumbs the Renaissance archives, uncovering previously unpublished and untranslated documents, and trolls the earthy cantinas of Carrara, where old cavatori who wrestled giant blocks from the mountains by hand recount the miseries and glories of a vanishing heroic age. He takes readers along with another sojourner, the exiled poet Dante Alighieri, who drew his visions of Hell and Purgatory partly from the surreal panorama of Carrara's quarries. Interweaving art, architecture, science, politics, folklore, and even quarry cuisine, he traces the mystique of marble and the magic of the stone carver's art from prehistory to the present, and shows how they culminate in the triumph and tragedy of Michelangelo's Pygmalion-like quest to bring life out of stone.

Publishers Weekly

Like Levi Strauss and denim, Michelangelo and the Carrara quarries go together. As early as 1497, the Italian sculptor traveled there to acquire blocks of stunning white marble, thought to be the purest in the world, and over the next two decades he made several more trips, staying for as long as eight months at a time. From this marble, Michelangelo wrought the Piet , David, Moses and the statuary of Pope Julius II's tomb. Scigliano's book is a sort of retrace-the-footsteps-of-Michelangelo journey through the Carrara quarries, present and past. Sprawling and garrulous, the book covers every little detail of both Michelangelo's history with the marble and Scigliano's own connection to it (his great-great-grandfather was a Carrara quarryman). Scigliano squeezes in presentations of marble arcana, conversations with today's cavatori, readings of Michelangelo's poems, mini-lessons in geology and language, accounts of the Sistine Chapel cleaning and the Vermont granite workers' strikes, and analysis of the impact of WWII on Tuscany-but his narrative isn't strong enough to hold the mix together convincingly. Clearly a labor of love, and perhaps of filial piety as well, the volume is exhaustive -an upward climb for the reader. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Introduction: Aristide's Trail

Chapter 1 Pietra Viva

Chapter 2 The Sculptor in the Garden

Chapter 3 Cities of Stone

Chapter 4 The Magra's Mouth

Chapter 5 The Cardinal's PietÀ

Chapter 6 David and the Orphan Stone

Chapter 7 The Painter and the Sculptor

Chapter 8 The Tomb of Dreams

Chapter 9 The Brotherhood of Stone

Chapter 10 The Agony of the Bronze

Chapter 11 Painting in Stone, Sculpting with Paint

Chapter 12 The Promised Land

Chapter 13 "The Mirror of All Italy"

Chapter 14 Taming the Mountain

Chapter 15 The Walls Come Tumbling Down

Chapter 16 The Kiss of the Medici

Chapter 17 The Last Blows of the Chisel

epilogue: Another War

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index