Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  * * *

  The close-up views of white-marble peaks in the clear mountain air hang over the village and dominate the small square in front of the parish church dedicated to San Bartolomeo. There, a long, rectangular block of white marble shows off hand-carved miniatures of quarry workers scaling a cliff face, chipping away at slabs of the stone. Inside is a stunning carved relief of Mary ascending to heaven. The interior of this church, with its various marble carvings, along with the stone block honoring quarry workers out front and the 360-degree views of blazing white peaks from its tiny piazza are worth the journey to Colonnata.

  Gourmands have another reason to come here. Colonnata is also known for its style of well-seasoned lardo, or pig fat, that cavatori devoured in great quantities for each noontime meal over the centuries—along with a tomato, perhaps an onion, and wine—to maintain their strength during incredibly demanding daily labor.

  It comes in various colors. I am not the first traveler to notice that in a way these changes in color are symbolic of the various shades of marble found in these mountains. Lardo is so important in this area that Colonnata’s patron saint is not the Madonna, patron saint of cavatori. Instead it is Saint Bartholomew, the patron saint of butchers. There is even a lardo festival each year in this village.

  I tried lardo a few times: a nicely seasoned sample from an outdoor vendor who set up his table outside the Medici palace in Seravezza, and at a restaurant in Capezzano Monte high on the slope above Pietrasanta. The taste was astounding—the seasonings of rosemary, pepper, and other herbs made it worth the experiment. And once I had a small crust of warm bread with a small slice of lardo melted on top. Delightful. But too much of this delicacy, I felt, could stop my heart cold, unless I was engaged daily in quarrying stone.

  * * *

  Carrara may produce highly sought-after marble in a market that will last for many decades longer, but the bulk of the artist community is primarily centered close to Pietrasanta. The foundries and shops may have moved out of the town center, but they are not far away. Still, those wonderful bohemian early years of the 1960s, when young artists from all over the world were coming there, remain a distinct memory for my artist friend and Pietrasanta native Roberta Giovannini Onniboni. A few days after our first meeting, where she reminisced about the town’s artistic life in the ’60s, we went on a walk through the town. It is small, and I had walked these streets many times in the weeks after my arrival, but I still knew nothing about their history.

  We walked along Via Dei Piastroni, the street of the house of her birth. At its northern end, she pointed to Piazza Statuato, her primary playground as a child in the 1950s. “That was our space,” she said. “We would play games all day long and climb on that statue.” Today a fence surrounds the statue, a memorial to the soldiers of World War I. Children no longer play there. The piazza, a regular daytime pay lot for workers and visitors, is jammed with cars. But on Thursdays, cars are banished, and a huge market takes over. Dozens of vendors sell everything from underwear to toilet paper to strawberries to slabs of locally grown beef, pork, and heavily seasoned lardo.

  Roberta’s street, from Piazza Statuto on the northern edge of the city center to Piazza del Duomo in the middle of the town, is perhaps fifteen hundred feet long. It is one of five north–south stradi found within what would have been the original medieval town surrounded by high stone walls. To the south of the Duomo, the extensions of those five streets bear different names.

  As we walked, Roberta pointed to the façades of medieval-era structures that once housed sculpture studios. One, a large studio fifty years ago, is now broken down into three small shops and one restaurant. Another is an office for a political party’s public-assistance office.

  Today, no art is made along this street; it is sold in only a few shops. Its name, Via dei Piastroni, is only a reminder of its not-so-distant past. Translated literally, it refers to what artisans call a particular kind of decorative marble slab with a series of chiseled ridges—not art in a creative sense but a functional part of a decorative façade for a wall.

  Roberta began her career as an artigiana at age twenty-five, about the same time that Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who had begun working in Florence, came to Pietrasanta to attend a memorial service for his friend, the artist Jacques Lipchitz. Botero, whose name has an Italian origin and means “boat-maker,” liked what he saw in Pietrasanta, and its overwhelming atmosphere of contemporary art. He has been in the town ever since. Roberta said that Botero has told her: “When I die, I want to remain in Pietrasanta.”

  As she did with other artists, she became his assistant. They meshed so well together that Botero would trust her to finish his models, in clay, once he had decided on the image. He would mold half of the model to indicate how it should look and ask her to finish the other half and then see it through production.

  Of her skill as an artist, she said she has this innate ability to see a work of art, whether Botero’s or her own, “only in my mind and eye. I can put myself into the mind of Botero and others.” For example, she would oversee the completion of the Colombian’s work in the fonderia where his bronze figures, giant and small, are cast and put together by a series of craftspeople, and know exactly what he would accept or reject.

  Early on, Roberta said it was difficult for women to become established in the artist culture of Pietrasanta.

  “Eventually, foreigners would give me a lot of work, but the Italians were slow to accept a woman as a sculptor,” she said matter-of-factly and without rancor. “It is just the way it was. But it has changed.”

  It has always been easy for her to support herself, until recent years. “Five years ago, there was no problem making money. Today it is more difficult because of the economy.”

  Many artists I spoke with in Pietrasanta told me the same thing: Sales are significantly down because of the financial woes of Europe and America.

  When Roberta abandoned her role working as someone’s assistant and struck out on her own as a sculptor, she said she would still get calls from Botero and others seeking her help.

  “Botero is the only one I will do this for today,” she told me over coffee one humid late-June afternoon. “I tell all others, no.”

  When I met her in the spring of 2012, Roberta was helping Botero prepare for his mostra, his huge exhibition in honor of his forty years in Pietrasanta and his eightieth year of life. Years earlier, he purchased a large house just a few hundred yards from the town’s main square, and there he remains today with his wife, the Greek artist Sophia Vari. He is often seen wandering through the square or sitting in a wicker chair outside one of the five bars, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Forty years later, he is Pietrasanta’s most famous artist-resident, and his art depicting oversized people and animals is displayed throughout—from huge bronze statues to a pair of frescoes, on opposite walls of a tiny church on via Mazzini, that show Botero’s visions of Hell and Judgment Day. This fresco work is much in the tradition, but modernized, of Michelangelo’s masterpieces on the end walls of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.

  Roberta’s own three-dimensional painting Previsione was hanging in the Church of St. Agostino as part of an exhibition that soon would be removed so Botero’s could be set up. The painting, which also could qualify as sculpture, is created out of Plexiglas, resin, and an acrylic. The subject, a man in dark glasses, seems to be looking at the observer from all directions; his sharp, pointed face protrudes from the bottom panel, almost inviting the observer to rub noses with him. It is vibrantly colorful, figurative art.

  Roberta has had major shows elsewhere in Europe, including the European Parliament building in Brussels. She spent a year in Singapore helping restore a church. In her Pietrasanta studio, she works in many different forms with her strong, large hands that completely envelop the hand of an acquaintance and exude overpowering strength. These are hands, arms, and broad shoulders that come from years of lifting, molding, and chipping marble with hamme
rs and chisels.

  As an artigiana, she would be handed all kinds of material—marble, clay, bronze, wax, plaster—and told to make the finished piece.

  “Sometimes I work in marble, just for me, for my pleasure.” Often, she will experiment with a type of Japanese clay, raku, or various resins, wood, Plexiglas, and terra-cotta.

  When using marble, she might make clay or plaster models of her proposed work, but when transferring that image to the actual stone, she said she does not use a pantographo, a device used to keep the same relationships, say of eyes to nose, or breast to chin, to the work in stone that may be two, three, four, or more times larger than the plaster model. Some statues—for example a Lipchitz bronze that might have ended up more than sixty feet high—were made by artigiani who followed a significantly smaller model but kept the relationships precisely the same. Roberta said she visualizes those relationships; for her, the pantographo is unnecessary.

  A visitor to a studio, shopping for a statue he or she may want in marble, can see how this process works. If the visitor wants a replica of Michelangelo’s David, the studio would show a small model that is perhaps the size of a normal person, or even smaller. Then, the studio’s artists can use that plaster model, along with a pantographo, to make the newly carved statue in marble any height the customer wants.

  It is a good life, Roberta said, one that has evolved well past the marble-only culture that dominated at the time of her birth more than sixty years ago. Pietrasanta is still a haven for artists but has become much more expensive than it was forty years ago when her career began and before the creative people who toiled there became famous.

  THREE

  Working in Stone

  Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

  —Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

  IN PIETRASANTA and elsewhere in northwest Tuscany where art predominates, the people who work in stone—sculptors and artigiani, or assistants—are usually easily spotted. Their clothes are dusted with a powder that suggests they are either taking a coffee break from their job in the back room of a bakery or they just spent the morning chipping marmo, or granite, or shaping softer travertine.

  A fine whiteness might smudge their faces and coat their hands. It can permeate their hair, unless the top of the head, for men and women alike, is wrapped in a turban of sorts. Some of the males, particularly among the artigiani, tend to wear caps denoting favorite soccer teams or businesses. Several craftsmen whom I saw in various studios wore hats made of folded newspaper. These newspaper hats are reminders of what northern Italian quarry workers traditionally wore as a kind of badge of honor—and a way to distinguish themselves and their craft from other laborers.

  Many of the powder-dusted workers are the assistants. The sculptors themselves, the artisans whose names go with massive works carved out of stone, typically do not perform a lot of the carving of those works. There are exceptions, of course. I met two acclaimed sculptors in Pietrasanta who do all of their own work, from designing and creating the model, to shaping the marble and polishing the final work.

  When assistants are used, a sculptor will create the concept of an individual piece (large and small), design it, and create a plaster, clay, or wax model to guide the assistant, who will start chipping away on the marble block with power tools—sometimes the simple hammer and chisel will be hauled out—to define the margins of the piece. Usually, a four-inch margin of safety is left around the figure’s rough outline.

  In an essay, Anna Laghi, coauthor of Pietrasanta: Work of Art, describes how the block is marked up by using a compass or pantograph to transfer reference points from the model to the roughed-out block.

  In a small laboratorio in Valdicastello Carducci, about three miles southeast of Pietrasanta, I watched sculptor Stefano Pierotti having an intense conversation with his artigiani and working with a pantographo on his plaster model. Then he would move the locked-in device to the same points on the face of his marble work in progress. In the thirty minutes or so that I watched, he moved the device back and forth between plaster model and marble block dozens of times. Often, he would consult with his assistant before actually chipping away a few flakes from his statue’s face, then pause again to use the pantographo.

  In this case, the sculptor was doing the work and the artigiano was offering advice. But these consummate craftsmen and women might go further in executing the sculptor’s concept and design. As the work takes on its final shape and form, the sculptor typically steps in and fine-tunes and polishes key elements. Or, if he or she trusts the artigiani, the assistants might even do some of the smoothing and polishing.

  “It has been this way from the very beginning,” asserts Nicola Stagetti, a forty-eight-year-old who began working as an artigiano at age sixteen at Basanti Art Center, one of the larger studio complexes, or laboratori, still in operation close to Pietrasanta’s historic center.

  “Even Michelangelo had assistants,” Stagetti said.

  Laboratori abound near Pietrasanta and its outlying areas. Big and small, they are spaces where art is being made by dozens of assistants and sculptors alike. The sounds of hammering and chiseling—cold steel against cold steel, steel against stone, pneumatic chisels grinding away—predominate in some surrounding neighborhoods throughout the day.

  There is even a tiny, one-room shop across a narrow courtyard from where I lived for nearly six months in Pietrasanta. It was there that I would see seventy-four-year-old Franco Lombardi, who started sculpting at age eleven, inside his dark shop carving sprays of flowers on flat pieces of pure-white marble. His specialty: grave markers.

  Marble isn’t the only art form created here. During the summer months, a painter can often be seen with easel set up in a corner of Piazza del Duomo, oils in one hand, a brush in the other, and a steady gaze toward the hill above Pietrasanta and the tiny village of Capezzano Monte perched way up there. Since the 1970s, bronze art in particular has become more and more popular here. Some marble sculptors work in both forms; others specialize solely in bronze.

  * * *

  One incredibly humid morning in late July, Roberta Giovannini Onniboni took me on a tour of the various kinds of studios in and around the town. The first stop was Cervietti Studio, a large complex where artigiani, working on perhaps a dozen projects, were re-creating traditional statues of religious and mythological figures and a few new ones, either for clients or for sculptors. One massive project under way was a re-creation of the sculptures found in the giant fountain of Versailles outside of Paris. These sculptures were destined for Taiwan.

  I watched as Franco Viviani gently works his martello, or specialized power chisel, to softly shape a piece of white marble, referring every few minutes to a plaster model, taking precise measurements, and then moving back to the actual stone to shave a bit here, a slight piece there.

  Across the room in the modern, high-ceilinged studio, Moreno Cervietti was, in contrast to Franco’s precise fine-tuning with a power tool, pounding away with hammer and chisel at the outer fringes of a new block of stone. Chips were flying. Seeing him with his noise-canceling headphones and his safety glasses made me wonder how ancient and medieval sculptors and their artigiani did it without any of today’s modern protection.

  Leaving Cervietti Studio, we moved on to a tiny studio, down the narrow road next to the railway line that connects all the towns of coastal Tuscany. Inside, we found Alessandro Pertrucci up to his elbows in wet plaster, preparing a mold of a woman’s head made from a clay model. This mold could be used to make copy after copy of the head, obviously that of a modern woman but also in the tradition of the gods and goddesses from ancient Greece and Rome.

  Alessandro, a professional modeler, or formatore, also had lined the interior of the mold with a thin layer of rubber, which allows the head to be cast in bronze if the client so wishes.

  On this day, the model was being prepared for a plaster copy, and Alessandro’
s hands moved deftly around the interiors of the two halves, piling a bit of wet plaster here and there, evening out the depth, then smoothing the edges and removing the excess with a flat blade. Eventually, the two halves would be joined and, much later, taken apart, revealing a plaster model of the head. Small bits of excess hardened plaster would be trimmed and the head smoothed to the kind of sheen the client ordered.

  The next stop was at the Fonderia Mariani, the foundry owned by Adolfo Mariani, a friendly, mustachioed, fifty-something whom I had regularly seen in CRO, the local workers’ club in front of my apartment on Vicole Porta a Lucca.

  His fonderia is truly a large industrial operation, specializing in casting and assembling bronze sculptures, from small to giant. The mysteriousness of the process of creating bronze captivated me. Like Alessandro’s small shop, this foundry also had mold-makers who make rubber or silicone molds that are then filled with wax.

  The model is wrapped in a fireproof material. When it goes into the kiln, the heat melts the wax, leaving empty spaces around the figure to be filled with molten bronze during the actual casting process.

  I watched the casting of part of what would become a giant sculpture by Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Four men were wrapped in flameproof clothing and had shields of tinted plastic over their faces. They manipulated a caldron of molten bronze. One man operated a remote-control device to pull the caldron out of its raging furnace and move it over to the large box where the model was buried in mounds of coarse-grained sand, a funnel sticking out of the top to direct the bronze liquid down into the spaces left by the melted wax. Two other men, at either end of a long clamp gripping the caldron, held on to bars that allowed them to tip it for pouring into the funnel. A fourth man, armed with a long-handled hoe-type tool, stood on a box so he could see into the caldron as he stroked the liquid bronze out with the hoe’s blade.