Carrara: The Marble Quarries of Tuscany

Rating:
Summary: Creation and destruction
Review: This gorgeous book is about the centuries-long process of destroying a body of rock. Every picture shows a landscape or an interior white with the dust of Carrara's exceptionally pure marble; stonecutters white with the dust; even some pictures where you can't tell whether it's fog or dust in the air, or whether it's snow or dust on the rooftops. Carrara is the source of marble for some of the most revered works of sculpture in the Western canon: Michelangelo's David and the Pieta; Bernini's busts, St. Teresa, and hundreds more. To see it all as essentially an industrial process, and to see the people who have given their lives to quarrying this rock, is beautiful, bitter, and moving. There's also a great essay at the back by an Australian anthropologist, which is well worth the read.