6. Information based on phone interview with Jon Mendelson and Karen D’Arcy, Division of Science, Governors State University, April 2007.
7. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 415.
8. Most of the details in the following section comes from work originally collected by William Wallace in his fascinating and thorough Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I could not have put together this story of Michelangelo without Dr. Wallace’s book and his generosity in answering my numerous questions.
9. Michelangelo to Domenico Buoninsegni, May 2, 1517, Letters Translated from the Original Tuscan, ed. E. H. Ramsden (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1963), 105–7.
10. Michelangelo to Domenico Buoninsegni, January 1519, Letters, 123.
11. Using the trench and wedge technique, the Egyptians quarried a block 137 feet long weighing 1,168 tons. A flaw in the stone prevented it from being used and it still rests in the quarry at Aswan. By the fifth century BCE, according to Xenophon, the Greeks had developed quarries in Piraeus large enough to hold hundreds of prisoners of war from Syracuse.
12. Michelangelo to Buonarroto di Lodovici Simoni, July 28, 1515, Letters, 93.
13. Michelangelo to Derto da Filicaia, August 1518, Letters, 117–18.
14. Michelangelo to Pietro Urbano, April 20, 1519, Letters, 124–25.
15. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London: William H. Colyer, 1846), 35–36.
16. Michelangelo to Lionardo, December 21, 1518, Letters, 121.
17. In February 2007 Gabriele Morolli, an architectural historian in Florence, reported that he had found three of Michelangelo’s columns in Pisa. He transported one to Florence and planned to dig up the others. Many art historians remain skeptical of Morolli’s find, and no information has been forthcoming since the discovery.
18. Michelangelo to unknown, possibly Ser Bonaventura di Leonardo, March 1520, Letters, 128, 130–31.
19. The great classics archaeologist John Ward-Perkins used this phrase.
20. Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 243.
21. J. Clayton Fant, “The Roman Emperors in the Marble Business: Capitalists, Middlemen or Philanthropists,” in Classical Marble: Geochemistry, Technology, Trade, ed. Norman Herz and Marc Waelkens (Dordrect,Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 147–59.
22. “This marble is known to Roman stone-cutters as Marmo Greco Fetido (fetid Greek marble) and Marmo cipolla (onion marble), because when sawn it emits a fetid odour”: Mary Winearls Porter, What Rome Was Built With: A Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 77. This is not an unusual phenomenon; organic remains in the rock can disintegrate and form a sulfurous gas, which gets trapped in the crystal lattice. Breaking the stone releases the gas.
23. Giuseppe Bruschi, Antonio Criscuolo, Emanuela Paribeni, and Giovanni Zanchetta, “14C-dating from an old quarry waste dump of Carrara marble (Italy): evidence of pre-Roman exploitation,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 5 (2004): 3–6. This early date has not been widely accepted.
24. During the first excavation of Marmorata, in 1868, workers found over twelve hundred large blocks of marble and several thousand cut slabs. Pope Pius XII controlled the dig, which has been called an appalling operation because of the lack of detailed records. The pope used the ancient stones to rebuild churches throughout Italy and to reset the marble paving around the Pantheon. He also sent material across Europe and as far away as Argentina. Clayton Fant argues convincingly that much of the Marmorata material was substandard or defective and therefore rejected, as opposed to other archaeologists who argue that overproduction and oversupply led to abandonment of the stone at Marmorata.
25. Jerry Brotton,The Renaissance Bazaar: From Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106.
26. James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (London: A. Zwemmer, 1961), 139.
27. Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (Burlington,VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 143.
28. Ackerman, Architecture, 6.
29. Gloria Ciarapica and Leonsevero Passeri, “Late Triassic and Early Jurassic Sedimentary Evolution of the Northern Apennines: An Overview,” Bollettino della Societa Geologica Italiana 124 (2005): 189–201.
30. Leonsevero Passeri and Federico Venturi, “Timing and Causes of Drowning of the Calcare Massiccio Platform in Northern Apennines,” Bollettino della Societa Geologica Italiana 124 (2005): 247–58.
31. L. Carmignani and R. Kligfield, “Crustal Extensions in the Northern Apennines: The Transition from Compression to Extension in the Alpi Apuane Core Complex, Tectonics 9, no. 6 (1990): 1275–303.
32. Carlo Baroni, Giuseppe Bruschi, and Adriano Ribolini, “Human-Induced Hazardous Debris Flows in Carrara Marble Basins (Tuscany, Italy),” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 25 (2000): 93–103.
33. Other marbles may have impurities of iron or manganese oxides, which generate red, yellow, cream, or pink marbles. So called “green marble” is the metamorphic rock serpentine.
34. John Logan, “On-Site and Laboratory Studies of Strength Loss in Marble on Building Exteriors,” in Fracture and Failure of Natural Building Stones: Applications in the Restoration of Ancient Monuments, ed. S. K. Kourkoulis, (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 345–62.
35. Stone, Evolution of an Architect, 141.
36. Standard Oil’s 1972 annual report lists 46,627 employees. No number was kept on how many had training in geology, but it seems logical that many of them must have had a geologic background. How else do you find oil?
9: READING, WRITING, AND ROOFING
1. Slate pencils were made of soapstone or softer slate and left a light, erasable mark on the tablets. Curiously, between 1867 and 1904, the NewYork Times reported on six children dying from slate pencil wounds; nearly all of the youth fell on their pencils by accident.
2. Stephen Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: a History of West Point (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 19.
3. Another missionary, Reverand John Williams, wrote in his memoir that students on the Cook Islands in 1833 lacked chalk for writing so broke off the spines of a sea urchin, burnt them slightly, and used the spines for writing. The spines came from the slate pencil urchin, Heterocentrotus mammillatus, and had been used for centuries as files to make bone and shell fishhooks.
4. Modern blackboards are no longer made of slate. They may be ceramic-coated steel, or enameled or painted composites. Manufacturers consider the ceramic boards to be more durable, with a shelf life of fifty years. Not bad unless you consider that slate boards from the early 1900s still look as good as the day they went up.
5. I could not have written about the geology of slate without several thorough and helpful phone conversations with Jack Epstein. Dr. Epstein also read a draft of this chapter.
6. The statistics on use of slate, as well as subsequent information on the change from Welsh to American slate, come from Jeffrey S. Levine, “An history of the United States slate industry (1734–1988)” (Master’s thesis), Cornell University, 1988).
7. Boston Building Ordinances, 1631–1714, Journal of Society Of Architectural Historians 20, no. 2 (1961): 90–91.
8. Samuel Carpenter built the house, which later served as home for William Penn and William Trent, founder of Trenton. It was razed in 1867.
9. There is little evidence that the Peach Bottom Slate won any award in London in 1851. According to the official archives of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, no slate from Pennsylvania was entered at the show. The earliest reference to the award that I could find is an article in the July 30, 1910, magazine The Mining World. Seems a bit odd that there is no mention of this from any newspaper of the day. I suspect we will never
know exactly how the story got started.
10. The red Indian River slate formed 464 million years ago. The purple and green slates come from a rock unit known as the Middle Granville and formed 530 million years ago. Vermont produces a black slate that was deposited 540 million years ago. Principal metamorphosis occurred 450 million years ago during the Taconic orogeny.
11. Two black slates come from Pennsylvania, the 445-million-year-old Martins-burg and the 455-million-year-old Peach Bottom Slate. Virginia’s slate formed 450 million years ago and Maine’s 30 million years later, with metamorphosis occurring about 370 million years ago during the Acadian orogeny.
12. In 1931 the British Standards Institution sought to establish a uniform system for roofing shingles. Abandoned were terms such as “lady,” “countess,” and “duchess.” They had arisen in the 1700s replacing the Catch-22-esque “single,” “double,” “double doubles,” and “double double doubles,” as well as the equally poetic “farewell,” “mope,” “haghattee,” and “Jenny-why-gettest-thou.”
13. Ben Kantner, interview with author, Snohomish,Washington, January 2008.
14. Many people choose copper over stainless steel because they like the look, especially when using copper gutters. Like stainless steel, copper doesn’t rust. It also inhibits moss growth.
15. When it became known that John Quincy Adams purchased a billiard table and placed it in the White House in 1825, representative Samuel Carson of North Carolina condemned the president for a sin that “would shock and alarm the religious, the moral, and reflecting part of the community.”
16. Gravestone researchers refer to documentation of slate coming from Slate Island as early as 1630. In addition, twenty tons of slate were quarried near Brain-tree and on Hangman’s Island in 1721. These dates raise a question about the claim that the Peach Bottom quarry is the first in America. Which was first probably depends on how one defines quarry.
17. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon &Schuster, 2003), 470.
18. Written on July 26, 1838, by Enoch Cobb Wines and published in A Trip to Boston in a Series of Letters to the Editor of the United States Gazette (Boston: Little and Brown, 1838), 45.
19. Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 218.
20. Mount Auburn Cemetery lifted its slate ban in the 1870s during a period of colonial revival resulting from the country’s centennial celebrations. Other cemeteries also returned to using slate. The new slate grave markers preserved the shape of the old, but not the symbols of the Puritans. Floral decorations replaced death’s-heads. Most of the slate came from eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as Maine and Pennsylvania. Some carvers also imported slate from Wales.
10: “AUTUMN 20,000 YEARS AGO”
1. Chris Romanek, phone interview with author, April 2007.
2. Translations of Vitruvius are based on Ingrid D. Rowland, trans., Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) or from the various papers of Marie Jackson.
3. I could not have written this section on travertine, Vitruvius, and Roman building techniques without the support of Dr. Jackson. She graciously answered numerous questions and read the text and corrected my interpretations. Key works include: M. D. Jackson, F. Marra, R. L. Hay,C. Cawood, and E. M.Winkler, “The Judicious Selection and Preservation of Tuff and Travertine,” Building Stone in Ancient Rome, Archaeometry 47, no. 3 (2005): 485–510; Marie Jackson and Fabrizio Marra, “Roman Stone Masonry: Volcanic Foundations of the Ancient City,” American Journal of Archaeology 110 (2006): 403–436; Marie Jackson, Cynthia Kosso, Fabrizio Marra, and Richard Hay, “Geological Basis of Vitruvius’ Empirical Observations of Material Characteristics of Rock Utilized in Roman Masonry,” Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Construction History 2 (2006): 1685–1702.
4. Janet DeLaine,“The Supply of Building Materials to the City of Rome,” in Settlement and Economy in Italy 1500 b.c. to a.d. 1500, ed. N. Christie. Papers of the Fifth Conference in Italian Archaeology, Oxbow Monograph 41 (1995): 554–62.
5. Information on cutting and use of dowels is from Lynne Lancaster, “The Process of Building the Colosseum,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 57–83.
6. Robert Folk, phone interviews with author, March 2007.
7. Henry S. Chafetz and Robert L. Folk, “Travertines: Depositional Morphology and the Bacterially Constructed Constituents,” Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 54 (1984), 289–316.
8. In a notorious case in the mid-1990s, which mimics what happened in Chicago to Big Stan, a high-rise office building in Boston had to have every travertine panel reanchored because of frost-induced cracking. Some panels required extra bolts because of numerous cracks and other panels had to be replaced because of excess damage.
9. Dante mentions the Bulicame in Canto XIV of the Inferno. He wrote of a brook visited by prostitutes, and more appropriately, “Its bed and both its banks were made of stone, together with the slopes along its shores.” That stone, of course, was travertine.
10. Paula Noble, phone interview with author, August 2007.
11. Robert L. Folk, “SEM Imaging of Bacteria and Nannobacteria in Carbonate Sediments and Rocks,” Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 63 (1993), 990–99.
12. Brenda Miller, phone interview with author, May 2007.
13. Many publications state that the Getty travertine came from the same quarry as the Colosseum travertine. This is not technically correct. After two thousand years, no original quarries remain from the time of the Romans. Both the Colosseum and Getty stone came from the historic Barco region.
14. Richard Meier, Building the Getty (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 186.
15. Meier quote is from a brochure produced by the Getty Museum titled Architecture of the Getty.
16. Michael Palladino, interview with author, Los Angeles, March 14, 2007.
17. Quote comes from Meier’s acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize, which he won in 1984.
18. Meier, Building the Getty, 57.
19. The first big Italian travertine project was New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1910. Penn Station led to a minor boom in travertine imports but mostly in smaller projects, ironically including the interior of the county courthouse in Bedford, Indiana, built in 1930.
20. Fabrizio Mariotti, interview with author,Tivoli, Italy, October 18, 2007.
21. Mariotti is correct that deposition occurred twenty thousand years ago, but the primary period of deposition appears to be older. Geologists have not focused on dating specific layers of travertine. Generally, deeper layers are older, though there is not a direct correlation between age and depth.
22. Meier, Building the Getty, 104.
A Note on the Author
David B. Williams writes about the natural world from his home in Seattle. He has been a national park ranger in Moab,Utah, and Boston, writes curriculum for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and teaches geology programs for the North Cascades Institute. Past books include The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist and A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country. He has written for Smithsonian, High Country News, and Science World, and frequently contributes to Earth magazine and the Seattle Times. An avid reader, hiker, and biker, he lives with his wife, Marjorie Kittle.
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