To understand the magic and mystery of Carrara marble, I was told to start with a ride up a mountain. So one crisp afternoon last spring, I donned a blue safety helmet and an orange vest and hopped into a Land Rover with Michael Bruni, a local guide.
The two-way, one-lane road was badly paved, and halfway up the mountain it became a rutted track littered with rocky debris. The incline was so steep and the switchback curves so sharp that Bruni had to stop the truck before we could turn. Beneath our wheels rocks shook and bounced the truck like a toy. Bruni explained that chunks of the mountain break off from the cliffs during heavy rainstorms or when mountain goats clamber up the slopes. He gesticulated dramatically as he told me about past disasters.
“Both hands on the wheel!” I said.
Eventually we arrived at a flat lookout. Cut into the mountainside, off to our right, was a base installation for water tanks, trucks, forklifts and other heavy machinery. Workers wielding power saws cut blocks of stone ten feet deep from the sheer face of the mountain. There was no silence, only the shrieking of machines drilling into stone. It was only when I looked out toward the jagged peaks of the Apuan Alps and saw them frosted not with snow but with white, chalky marble that I could appreciate the vibrant beauty of this precious stone, which has defined this part of Italy for more than 2,000 years.
In antiquity, Roman enslaved workers, free men and convicts removed marble from these mountains with wedges and picks to build Trajan’s Column and parts of the Pantheon. Great sculptors have been drawn to Carrara in the centuries since, from Bernini, Canova and Rodin to Jean Arp and Henry Moore. But nobody is more closely associated with Carrara than Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest sculptor ever to live. In 1497, when he was only 22, he came looking for the ideal pale stone for La Pietà, the first of his Renaissance marble masterpieces, now installed at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Bruni explained that Michelangelo spent long stretches in these hills in search of perfect blocks of marble, especially the bright white “statuario,” a type of pure stone nearly devoid of silica that best captures the vitality and sheen of the human form.
Michelangelo cultivated relationships with excavators, cutters and carvers so that they would favor him with their best blocks, and he offered precise instructions about the shape and size of the marble he desired. Then, satisfied, he would hammer and chisel until the figure revealed itself. His ghost still hovers above the quarries here. You can hear the famous words attributed to the Italian master: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
The British-born, New York-based photographer Caleb Stein has long been fascinated with that moment of discovery, which he identifies as “the point where the suggestion of a shape of a figure begins to emerge from what is still a discernible block of marble.” Earlier this year, Stein learned that an industrial area outside Carrara was home to a group of up-and-coming marble sculptors—powerful, automated robots belonging to a company called Litix (formerly Robotor). Stein, whose photographs often highlight the sculptural nature of the human body, traveled to Carrara to document the process of a single sculpture’s creation by a robot from beginning to end, the subject of these accompanying photographs. “I was interested in making intimate ‘portraits’ of the robots at work,” he said. “I wanted to extend tenderness and sensuality to the process, just as I would when photographing a person.”
