“Despite the numbers, there were no significant issues that panels would fail. They had stabilized after their initial loss of strength. I think there was no scientific reason to replace all of the panels, if Amoco practiced good maintenance,” said Logan. But science was not the only concern and lawyers got involved, concerned that even one failed panel might fall and injure someone.
“When a person comes in and says forty-four thousand pieces of marble on your building have to be removed, you go ‘whomp!’ Well, after I picked myself up off the floor, we said there has got to be some other solution besides removing the marble,” said Roger Hage, a vice president of Amoco, to a building conference in 1993.5 Engineers initially thought workers could cut each panel in half vertically and horizontally and bolt the four newly created, quarter-size panels to the building, but when they realized they would have to drill over 700,000 holes and caulk 176,000 panels, Hage’s team abandoned their resistance and began to look for the best way to replace the marble panels.
Amoco first secured every panel to the building using two white stainless steel straps per panel. After considering options ranging from replacement on an as-needed basis to full replacement with aluminum, Amoco decided to remove every marble panel and put up new two-inch-thick granite slabs. They came from a quarry in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where Logan had made a detailed geologic map to determine the best rock. He also took slabs and blocks back to his lab and heated, soaked, warped, and weighed them. On site, more technicians checked the panels before they were attached to the building. “They were probably the most tested granite panels in history,” said Logan.
The recladding project took four years from 1988 to 1992. Contractors designed and built a canopy to protect the public at ground level, erected a monorail system at five levels for moving panels and people, and installed hoists to raise and lower the granite. They replaced a floor and a half of panels per week, finishing in November 1991. Caulking ninety miles of stone and dismantling all equipment lasted until July 1992. Big Amy, as the building had been nicknamed, remained open throughout the process. (Once known as Big Stan, for its connection to Standard Oil, it is now called the Aon Center, after its principal tenant, the Aon Corporation.)
After removing the panels, which weighed over six thousand tons, Amoco received more than two hundred requests to use the marble. Five hundred tons went to a small company that made clocks, awards, and trinkets. The items sold at the Amoco headquarters for between $150 and $250. Nearly forty-five hundred tons ended up as golf ball–sized landscaping materials at various Amoco refineries. The final one thousand tons, crushed into fist-sized pieces, went to a local university as a lining for a pond.
Like a nagging sore, problems with Amoco’s marble didn’t end with its dispersal. One year after Governors State University lined their pond, hundreds of stocked bluegill, carp, and crappie died in the shallow water, right in front of a popular patio. Initial press reports focused on whether the marble or adhesive on the panels was responsible, but a study later revealed that a bacterial infection killed the fish. The marble was finally off the hook.6
* * *
If you want someone to blame for Amoco’s marble problems, you have to look no further than Michelangelo. Whether in sculpting or architecture, he exploited the brilliance and luminosity of marble as few have ever done. His work gave marble, particularly Carrara marble, the prestige that made it the material to use in corporate boardrooms, prestigious law firms, and rarefied social clubs. Marble good enough for Michelangelo had to be good enough for Standard Oil.
Michelangelo first became attracted to stone at a young age, or so he told his biographer Vasari. “Giorgio, if I have any intelligence at all, it has come from being born in the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I took the hammer and chisels with which I carve my figures from my wet-nurse’s milk.”7 Like so many others, his first experiences were hammering his local rock. Born in 1475 in Caprese, about fifty miles from Florence, Michelangelo spent his early years in the quarrying village of Settignano, where the stone carvers, or scarpellini, worked a blue gray sandstone known as pietra serena.
Suckled on stone or not, Michelangelo did not start as a sculptor. His father apprenticed the youngster to the great fresco painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo soon surpassed his master, who recommended his protégé to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the head of Florence’s ruling family. It was in Lorenzo’s garden that Michelangelo discovered marble, at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Lorenzo was a renowned patron of the arts, with a rich collection of Greek and Roman sculptures, plus a resident sculptor, Bertoldo di Giovanni, a student of Donatello, the greatest sculptor of the early to middle 1400s.
Again,Michelangelo’s precocious ability aided his development. Vasari described how the young artist so impressed Lorenzo with his first effort in sculpting—a copy of a faun—that Lorenzo invited Michelangelo to move into his house, gave him fine clothes, and allowed him to sit at the family dining table. Perhaps apocryphal, the faun has never been found, but Michelangelo did begin to work regularly with marble in the Medici garden. He remained in Lorenzo’s care for two years, until his patron’s death in 1492.
Over the next dozen years, while living in Bologna, Florence, and Rome, Michelangelo completed as many as ten sculptures. These include the Sleeping Cupid, which he dirtied up and tried to pass off as a Roman antique, and his first surviving life-size piece, a fleshy, staggering Bacchus. He also traveled to the quarries in Carrara, seventy-five miles east and north of Florence, for the first time to find a piece of marble. Out of a brilliantly white, crack-free block he carved the sublimely holy Vatican Pietà. Next came his colossal David, hewn from a block of Carrara first quarried in 1464, and later dragged through the mud to Florence and worked by two other carvers, before sitting outside in Florence for over three decades.
What unites his work, particularly the Pietà, David, and later Moses, is that Michelangelo had transcended his medium. He had become an alchemist, turning stone into living beings. When you look at any of these great statues, it is hard not to think that you are looking at works carved of flesh and cloth. Every fold, every muscle, every feature is so realistic that you expect David or Moses or Mary to become animate and to tell of the great thoughts revealed in their faces. It feels as if they are present.
By finding the essential elements of humanity and transmitting them to stone, Michelangelo had in turn bestowed a sense of grace on marble. No one who has seen the David or the Pietà could ever look at the material again and not be reminded of refinement, of the ethereal spirit of humanity. And those qualities eventually became synonymous with the stone, whether the viewer had seen Michelangelo’s work or not.
Everything about David is awe inspiring—his size, his location in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, the feeling of reverence in the air around him—yet only a few yards away is the Gallery of the Slaves, with its five roughed-out statues. The figure in each appears to be wrenching himself out of his marble bounds. In all five you can see the process of how Michelangelo chiseled a man out of rock, of how he mixed precise and rough cuts, of how he revealed the textures and light within the stone. These pieces are not made of flesh. You know Michelangelo was working with rock. They are not sensuous. They have a density and a mass. They are grounded.
Michelangelo described his process of sculpting as the “art which operates by taking away.” Other sculptors have written of releasing the spirit or story within the stone. I do not have the experience or knowledge to question artists’ beliefs, but the unfinished blocks illustrate a profound link between man and stone, a link where a man recognized the strengths and weaknesses of stone and worked with them to create astounding works of art. Exploited to its fullest by Michelangelo, the bond between stone and humankind is central not only to sculpting but also to architecture.
Like Amoco, Michelangelo also suffered for his decision to use Carrara. Instead of losing face and 70 to 80 million dollars, as Amoco di
d, Michelangelo almost died twice to get at the stone.8 In December 1516 he convinced Pope Leo X and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici that they should let him design a new façade for the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The façade would be “both architecturally and sculpturally, the mirror of all Italy,” wrote Michelangelo to the cardinal’s treasurer and liaison, Domenico Buoninsegni.9 Michelangelo proposed a more audacious undertaking than anything he, or anyone since antiquity, had done. The last great all-marble building in Italy had been constructed in 203, and the entire façade of San Lorenzo would be marble, including a dozen monolithic columns.
Although Michelangelo never ended up carving any pieces of marble for San Lorenzo, he spent years arranging for stone to be transported from Carrara to Florence. Ultimately, dozens of different-sized blocks arrived, some of which he later may have used in the Medici Chapel.
He also sold blocks, but most of his marble probably was stolen after he left Florence for good in 1534. His initial task was to locate good stone. Michelangelo could have worked with a middleman, who would find, cut, and deliver marble, but he didn’t trust the ones in Carrara and nearby Seravezza, two of the main towns of the marble district. The men cheated him. They didn’t understand marble. They didn’t even know how to quarry marble, or so he wrote Buoninsegni.10 In order to ensure good rock during the years he worked on San Lorenzo, Michelangelo traveled to the quarries, or cave, at Carrara and Seravezza nineteen times and spent eighteeen months organizing and supervising an ever-changing group of helpers. At Seravezza, about ten miles south of Carrara, he also had to coordinate building and widening several miles of new road, part of which required men with picks to cut a route deep into the marble mountains.
After finding the right stone, Michelangelo hired a crew of quarrymen, or cavatori, and scarpellini to cut blocks out of the mountain. First, they cut a narrow trench, then they pounded in either iron or wood wedges and forced the stone to split into a clean face. This is the same method Mr. Tarbox would “invent” almost three hundred years later. It is also the method used as far back as the Third Dynasty (ca 2686–2613 BCE) in Egypt. About the only significant difference between the early Egyptians and Michelangelo’s cavatori was the evolution of the wedges from copper (up to 1500 BCE) to bronze (up to the eighth or sixth century BCE) to iron.11
The quarries were also his mill; the notoriously penny-pinching Michelangelo wasn’t about to pay to transport excess stone or for stone that might have hidden flaws. To shape the stone, which might become a smaller block, a roughed-out figure still encased in a block, or a column, the scarpellini referred to pages of Michelangelo’s detailed drawings. One book of his drawings shows twenty-two different shapes, many of which required several exact copies. By August 1517 eight blocks and three figures, along with another half dozen cartloads of marble, were ready for transport.
And here the fun began. Not only did Michelangelo have to figure out how to move his unwieldy blocks, by land, by sea, and by river, but he had to pay exorbitant fees. In ancient Greece, for example, transporting stone had cost ten times what it cost to quarry, and the price doubled for every hundred miles it moved overland in Roman times. By Michelangelo’s day, fees had dropped, but still constituted a major cost of working in marble. He couldn’t avoid the middlemen who demanded money for everything from oxen rental to harbor fees to storage dues.
In moving stone,Michelangelo, and for that matter all movers of masses, had a simple goal: to resist the pull of gravity. Any time gravity led a block astray catastrophe struck. A block could slide too quickly down a slope and maim or kill. A heavily laden cart could sink into a road built across a swamp. A block could drop from a hoist and turn a boat into driftwood. To counter the adverse and untimely affects of gravity, Michelangelo relied on men and rope. Neither came easily. He wrote his brother that if the Carrarese “are not fools, they are knaves and rascals.”12 A crew walked off the job taking the hundred ducats he had paid them, and others quit in the middle of projects. The ropes, one of which was 422 feet long and weighed 566 pounds, could take days to arrive from Pisa, Florence, or Genoa. Michelangelo’s detailed records show that rope accounted for 18 percent of the total transportation costs. He also had to borrow pulleys, buy wood for sleds, and order custom-made turnbuckles and iron rings.
With all the equipment ready, the men tied the milled marble to a hardwood sledge called a lizza and slid it down lizza paths, or lizzatura. The ones in Carrara, which haven’t been used in decades, look more like ski slopes than ramps for lowering multi-ton blocks. The lizza traveled on greased or soaped poles laid like railroad ties. Rope wrapped around posts embedded along the lizzatura slowed the descent. As the block passed over a pair of poles, men picked up the poles and moved them around to the downslope side of the block. Rope men kept the rope taut around the posts until they ran out of material and had to move their arm-thick lines to the next post.
“It has been a bigger job than I anticipated to sling it [a column] down,” Michelangelo wrote to a friend in August 1518. The column was the first to be quarried for San Lorenzo, and the first marble column quarried since Roman times. Michelangelo continued: “Some mistake was made in slinging it, and one man had his neck broken and died instantly, and it nearly cost me my life.”13 They had gotten the column to within thirty-five yards of the road.
Seven months later Michelangelo tried to move another column. His workmen had lowered it only a hundred feet when a metal ring broke and the column shattered. “After it broke we saw the utter rascality of it . . . the iron in it was no thicker than the back of a knife,” he wrote in April 1519.14 Again, Michelangelo and his assistants almost died.
Not deterred by his near-death experiences, Michelangelo willed his marble blocks and columns off the mountains to a road for their five-to eight-mile-long journey to the Ligurian Sea. “Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and that being the road,” wrote Charles Dickens of an 1844 visit to Carrara. Nothing had changed in five hundred years, he observed. The carts were clumsy, the mistreated oxen often died on the spot, as did their drivers, “crushed to death beneath the wheels.”15
Dickens may have exaggerated, but Michelangelo’s columns and blocks eventually reached the sea, where a boat would carry the stone thirty miles down the coast to Pisa. To get the marble on the boat, which Michelangelo had spent several months locating, required building a ramp, digging a trench to lower the boat, and dragging the marble up the ramp. As workers loaded one block with a three-legged hoist, an iron ring broke. The boat was not damaged, and no one died, but the breakage delayed that shipment by another week. In Pisa, the men used another hoist to unload marble into a storage yard, where it sat waiting for the winter rains to arrive to raise the Arno River.
“I am dying of vexation through my inability to do what I want to do . . . the Arno is completely dried up . . . On this account I am more disgruntled than any man on Earth,” wrote Michelangelo.16 Even he had to wait on the weather. Winter was also a fallow time for farm lands, which allowed Michelangelo to hire oxen. He needed them to pull barges loaded with stone fifty-five miles upriver to Signa, an impassable point on the Arno about ten miles from Florence. Depending upon weather and the recalcitrance of oxen, the trip took from one to four weeks. At Signa, the men unloaded stone onto oxen-drawn carts for the final one- or two-day trip into Florence.
The first blocks reached Signa in January 1519. By March sixteen shipments ferrying forty-nine blocks had arrived. Michelangelo’s first of a dozen planned columns didn’t make it to Florence until two years later. No other columns arrived. Several broke or never left the quarry and six reached Pisa, only to vanish to history.17 Despite his fame,Michelangelo’s disappearing columns did not lead to the famous phrase “He lost his marbles.” Or maybe it did; thirteen months prior to the arrival of the lone column, Pope Leo X had canceled the San Lorenzo project. Michelangelo didn’t go crazy, bu
t he did write that he had been “ruined over the said work of San Lorenzo” and suffered an “enormous insult.”18 Additional marble blocks arrived throughout 1521. Michelangelo decided to use the stone elsewhere.
Michelangelo’s labors are the travails of countless others who struggled to get stone out of the ground and transport it across land and water. Quarrying has been called the most conservative of all crafts because it changed little from its origins more than four thousand years ago to the late 1800s, when machine power replaced manpower.19 We rightly marvel at the great works of architecture from the preindustrial world, extolling their design, their ingenuity in construction, and their durability. Perhaps we ought to marvel more that they got any stone to the sites.
Prior to Michelangelo, no one was more obsessed with marble than the ancient Romans. They traded for it, stole it, quarried it, and taxed it. Archaeologist Rudulfo Lanciani estimated that fifty thousand marble columns arrived at the Roman port of Ostia, of which nine thousand remained in the late 1800s. Another archaeologist has called marble the “sine qua non raw material” of the ancient Romans.20
Early Romans, like all other builders, began by using local rocks. As early as the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, quarries on the Palatine Hill provided soft, olive gray tuff, a volcanic rock also quarried from the surrounding Alban Hills and Monte Sabatini. Tuff and other nearby rocks, such as travertine and lava, remained popular throughout the republican era, but by the Republic’s waning days in the first century BCE, marble had moved to the forefront of popularity in the city.
Not everyone approved of the change. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, discussed marble’s early users, all wealthy politicians, and concluded that the fashion for marble was the “leading folly of the day.” He deplored marble as an extravagant display of luxury and, in some of the earliest condemnation of habitat destruction, he decried the hewing down of mountains simply for use as delights for the imagination. “One cannot but feel ashamed of the men of ancient times,” he wrote.
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