The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  Most of the artists who work in Pietrabella are unknown foreigners. Most of them are young. And most of them are destined eventually to see for themselves, if they are not told by others, that they are not going to be great sculptors. In most cases they are not going to be sculptors at all. But there is a time of life when this doesn’t matter very much. There is a time of life that is, for some, the most beautiful of all. It can be a few days. It can be a year, sometimes two. It usually happens away—somewhere we can be who we want to be, instead of who we are.

  For aspiring sculptors—their heads spinning with Brancusi and Moore, Bernini and Michelangelo—Pietrabella was that somewhere. It may be a centre of the marble industry in the Carrara area—the bustling headquarters of bathroom tiles, condominium lobbies, and kitchen backsplashes—but it is also a capital of artistic aspiration.

  There are established artists who live in the area. And there are others who visit regularly, coming to choose stone, or to work, or to oversee the transposition of a small clay or plaster model into a piece of marble big enough to command a public square in Berlin or the entrance to a cluster of corporate towers in Shanghai. It is the local artisans, almost more than the stone itself, that make the place famous.

  Henry Moore used to visit Pietrabella often. On occasion my mother was hired by one of the marble workshops to act as a guide for his excursions to the quarries. She remembered that his nose was very red. Botero lives not far away. Giovanni Belli’s photographs include portraits of Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Arp sitting in the Café David after their day’s work. But for the most part, Pietrabella is populated by freight handlers, diamond-saw operators, lorry drivers, marble workers, and commercial stone carvers. This is not, as Pier-Giorgio makes clear, very glamorous.

  Above the Café David in the main square there is a plaque marking the gloomy upstairs room where Michelangelo signed a contract for the stone he needed for one of the many projects that he never completed. But the bidets for the sultan of Brunei also came from the workshops of Pietrabella. Crucifixes and Pietàs, telephones and sinks, cupids and communion chalices are churned out morning and afternoon by the artisans of Pietrabella, men dressed in blue dust coats and folded newspaper hats who could carve the curls of Christ’s beard or the folds of Mary’s gown in their sleep. These traditions, passed from generation to generation, are ancient. But they are not, as Pier-Giorgio frequently points out, very sexy.

  Our office hears regular complaints from hotel guests who imagined their holiday as picturesque tranquility but who are awakened at eight in the morning by the whir of dozens of pneumatic chisels and the beeping of front-end loaders from the town’s marble workshops. The tourists who sit on the terraces of our cafés object to the noise and the fumes of passing lorries and stone-laden flatbeds. As a result, Pier-Giorgio rejects any marketing initiatives that emphasize the region’s industry. He takes particular pleasure in reminding us that our most important visiting artist did nothing but complain about what a shithole he found himself in.

  The combination of Michelangelo’s displeasure at being here and his disinclination to leave much evidence that he ever was, do not make him a very obvious marketing tool for regional tourism. He presents challenges, I admit. But Pier-Giorgio’s attitude, when I am foolish enough to bring the subject up in her presence, drives my mother crazy. “Greatness is greatness,” she says. “And morons are morons.”

  In order to get the full impact of Anna Di Castello’s aesthetic theories you’d have to sit at her outdoor dining table with her as she talks—at some length—about art. This is what my father did on the last, long evening he spent with her. He was going to buy his train ticket the next morning. He was going to sit for the last time at a table at the Café David and write in his journal the next day. And then he was going to come back to the farmhouse from Pietrabella to tell Anna that he was leaving her. But the night before all this would happen, she had talked about art until the light had fallen.

  My mother believes that art is a spirit, not a museum of objects, and that the work of the truly great—of whom there are very few—becomes part of what mankind is, not what it observes when it takes the time to visit an art gallery. Of course this spirit is visible in institutions such as the Accademia and the Louvre, but it is also apparent in the everyday. In fact, it is especially apparent in the everyday because the reason great art is great art—at least according to my mother—is that it is the everyday. The patterns of beauty that are apparent in a cobbled street, a mountain stream, or in the arch of boughs over the curve of a hillside path, are the same patterns found in the curves and planes, the light and shadow, of David, or Santa Teresa, or The Kiss. My mother conceives of art as being an ongoing song, to which centuries of voices contribute. And a few of the voices—Michelangelo is always the example she uses—are so great, they become the melody with which others harmonize.

  On that last evening, when she sat at her uncleared outdoor table, drinking wine and talking happily with my father, she insisted that the song was audible for anyone who cared to listen. She crumbled her hash, rolled her tobacco, set the spliff in the corner of her mouth, scratched a match on the rough underside of the marble slab—all without ceasing to speak. And her descriptions to him of the music she heard were various. It was energy. It was a magnetic field. It was a global grid of mystical points, responsible for outbursts of genius such as Charles Dickens, Dizzy Gillespie, and Leonard Cohen among others. She believed the stir Michelangelo created in the universe when he carved stone was something that could be felt still. She blew out the match with the exhaled smoke of her only pause.

  I’m not sure who would be more horrified by this—my mother or Pier-Giorgio—but I do sometimes think that even the most harried and exhausted tourist is still hoping for something magical to happen on a trip to Italy. Even the one whose feet are hurting the most, whose back is the most sore, and who is most bored by what a museum guide is saying must want to feel the ruffled air of the ghosts my mother feels all the time. It isn’t the fact that Michelangelo was once in the vicinity of her farmhouse that excites her. She thinks he still is.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Giovanni Belli spent a good deal of time looking for evidence of work undertaken by Michelangelo during what was, apparently, his unhappy time in the Carrara and Pietrabella area. When my father wondered how it was that Michelangelo could have been so grumpy about a place that seemed—at least to a visitor from a small, unremarkable place in North America—so very beautiful, my mother said that Michelangelo’s moodiness was not caused by where he found himself so much as by what he found himself doing. Which was not carving marble.

  IN 1968, AS HE SAT ON THE TERRACE of the Café David, Oliver had something. And what he had was being twenty. He thought it was his being in Italy. He wasn’t the first to confuse the two.

  Oliver had come to Pietrabella with no intention of staying for more than a few days. This was how long he had expected it would take for the Société Générale in Paris to transfer his funds to a bank in Pietrabella. Once that was sorted out, he’d recommence his travels. This proved to be an unrealistically optimistic view of the efficiency of European financial transactions in the late 1960s.

  Being an artist’s model was a job that he had never previously imagined for himself, nor one that he would ever feel capable of undertaking again. But during his four months in Italy—his four months with Anna Di Castello, his only four months anywhere that wasn’t Cathcart, half of which were spent waiting for the Société Générale to release the funds of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary—he was perfectly poised between his youth and his adulthood. This was a moment of grace he was able to put to some advantage. He needed to make some money and so he worked for Richard Christian: standing, sitting, squatting, twisting, and, for one of the figures in The Pope’s Tomb, simulating as best he could, without actually strangling, being hung naked in Richard’s studio. For Richard’s idea was that his captives, the figures that would populate the pede
stals and niches of his tomb, would be the grotesqueries of the modern age: the murdered, the tortured, the starving, the war-torn. But this wasn’t going to be easy—certainly not for his model. “This figure,” Richard explained as he demonstrated the cowering crouch he wanted for one of his captives, “has just been sprayed with napalm. I want to feel his skin bubbling.” They were, as Richard put it, “killer poses.”

  But Oliver was up for it. It was work. It was enough money to get by. He had arrived in a town of sculptors at the one instant in his life when artist’s model was an occupational possibility.

  SEATED AT A TABLE AT THE CAFÉ DAVID on his last day there—with the milk-foam on the rim of his cappuccino, with the smoke of his cigarette drifting across the piazza, with a train ticket in his pocket—Oliver Hughson was copying a verse of poetry in his rounded cursive into his journal. He liked the quotations in his journal to be neat. He wrote carefully:

  And you wait, you wait for the one thing

  that will infinitely increase your life;

  the mighty, the tremendous thing,

  the awakening of stones,

  depths turned to face you.

  It was a verse from “Memory,” and it wasn’t likely that Oliver was the only young person who, at that moment, was sitting down in an outdoor café to copy Rilke carefully into a journal. It was late in the summer of 1968. The youth hostels and train stations and art galleries of Europe were full of Olivers.

  At a café in the main square of Pietrabella, Oliver took a last inauthentic pull on his cigarette. He was not really a smoker. He just liked the way he looked with a cigarette. He finished his coffee. He put his cap on his pen. He tucked his journal and his Rilke into his rucksack. He stood to go.

  It was a slow time of morning, the midpoint between the early caffè corretto of the artisans on their way to their workbenches and the later cappuccinos of the lost-looking tourists who found their way, usually by accident, to Pietrabella.

  Oliver left a tip, more generous than usual. He’d be back someday, he was sure. Perhaps next summer. Or the summer after that. He had not quite thought things through.

  He looked around, taking in the red geraniums on the old brick balustrade, the tobacco shop, the cinema, the fountain, the wide, vacant steps of the cathedral. He looked to the east, up beyond the town wall to the hills. He could see the steep grey bluff that marked the western ridge of the Apuan mountains. He wished now that he had been more rigorous with his journal entries during the past four months. He wondered how vividly he’d remember the evenings when Anna sat at her marble table and taught him about the figures of beauty that so commanded her imagination. “Form,” she said. “Michelangelo was great because he understood that form is all we have. Here. Now.” Oliver wondered how clearly he’d remember the details of Anna’s face, her voice, her instruction.

  On one of his journeys along the region’s hillside trails, Michelangelo conceived of the idea of carving a giant into a craggy face of bald stone. This had great appeal to him. It would be enormous, for one thing. For another, carving directly into the bluff meant there would be no wagon contractor, no barge captain, and no rogue of a stone agent involved.

  Michelangelo’s letters to Rome hardly stopped. “I think I have been gulled,” he wrote in April 1518. “And it’s the same with everything. I curse a thousand times the day and the hour I left Carrara!”

  Michelangelo oversaw every aspect of quarrying, from choosing the face to be cut, to supervising the cutting itself, the sledding of the blocks down the mountainside, and the loading onto ox-drawn carts. He hired barges. He accompanied the blocks to the coast—an arduous and dangerous journey.

  In Pietrabella’s main square, Oliver stepped away from his table and gave a brief, ordinary wave to Claudio Morello, the café owner. Claudio was banging away, as usual, at the espresso machine.

  Anna liked the Café David. She was a fixture there. Claudio enjoyed her. Their political differences could not have been more extreme. Given her history, it was hard to imagine that a friendship between them could be possible. But it was. Their disagreements were swept away by their major point of agreement. They were both impatient with any artist who did not insist on comparison with the greatest. It was Claudio Morello, bar owner and fascist, who most outspokenly shared Anna’s belief in the uncompromising importance of beauty.

  At the Café David, Anna tended to become the centre of the tables full of foreign sculptors. Her English, her knowledge of all things local, and her looks meant that she never sat at a table by herself for very long.

  So Claudio tended to undercharge her. The stranieri wanted to drink grappa with her. And talk about Brancusi with her. And ask her where to buy the best olive oil, the best pancetta, the best claw chisels and fine rasps. And late at night, not long before Claudio presented them with the sobering reality of their bar bill, they wanted Anna to sing “Bella Ciao.” It was a song of the partisans, from the war.

  Oliver liked to go into town with Anna in the evenings. They got dressed up, a little. Which is to say, Anna got out of her cut-off jeans and construction boots, her T-shirt and bandana. She showered, or sometimes, when it was very hot, washed herself with the cold water from the old hand pump at the end of the garden.

  Oliver never knew anyone who looked better in a man’s white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. In the Café David, he sat back, slightly removed from the centre of the pulled-together tables. The wine and the grappa were ordered and reordered. He watched Anna. She was at the centre of everything. And when she was laughing and clapping her hands it was the rhythm of Anna’s muscular arms and shoulders and the movement of her shining hair that became the beat of everyone’s singing.

  O partigiano portami via / O bella ciao, bella ciao … It was the song of a partisan fighter leaving his beloved. It was the song of all young men off to war.

  Bella ciao ciao ciao!

  Anna enjoyed these gatherings. But Oliver liked their departures from the bar best. Then the cool nights tumbled down to the square from the mountains. The air smelled of damp stone as they started their way up from Via Maddalena to the olive groves, to the hillside path that led to Anna’s farmhouse. There were fireflies once they got beyond the town wall. “We are walking through what Michelangelo would have known,” Oliver said. “It’s like we go back in time.”

  Michelangelo walked the mountains, surveyed the quarries, tested small pieces, searched for breaks, studied veins. He listened to the stone, rapping it with a hammer to hear either the clank of imperfection or the clarity of a faultless ring. Marble can hide surprises—accessory minerals, or faults, or pockets that are not visible. And as Michelangelo studied the stone, he studied the quarry workers. His gaze returned to them again and again.

  They lifted, they pulled, they heaved, they strained. He watched their taut muscles and their tanned skin and the way the sweat ran down the crevasses of their necks. He watched their twisting, turning, bending bodies accommodate themselves to the demands of their work. They were usually young. But they had about them something even more irresistible than their youth: they had the camaraderie of young men joining together closely in dangerous work. They were soldiers of sorts.

  Nobody did male figures like he did. Vasari says that at the Santa Maria Novella job-site in Florence, the young Michelangelo “started to draw the scaffolding and trestles and various implements and materials, as well as some of the young men who were busy there.”

  From the café Oliver crossed the square and disappeared under the rooks’ nests in the portal of the town’s old wall. He’d always liked the walk from Pietrabella.

  He passed the train station where, earlier, he had bought his ticket for Paris. He passed a restaurant where he liked the bean soup. He passed a little hardware store where he bought some string once. He passed the doorways of a few vegetable stores he had come to know. He passed a good place to buy wine and olive oil that Anna had showed him. He crossed an intersection on the Aurelia. He took all this in
. He was aware that these places were now no longer where he was. They were what he was leaving.

  It was never an argument. It was never even much of a discussion. It was more like a running joke that Anna had with him, one that took the place of argument or discussion. But the subject never changed. “You are being pointed in a whole new direction,” Anna said one afternoon in their bedroom. “By fate. By destiny.” She always closed the shutters on the daytime heat. They could hear the landlord’s tractor in a distant patch of sun. Drying hay was on what breeze there was. “You are being shown your true path.” She tried, without success, not to laugh at herself. “Why can’t you see that, you stupido?”

  He continued south on the shoulder of the road, protected by the plane trees from the traffic: cars and scooters and rumbling lorries. He walked beside a pale wall that, twenty-three years after the war, still bore pockmarks of the Allied advance and the German retreat from the Gothic Line. “It was at this unhappy site,” a plaque explained (and that Oliver’s bad Italian could just work out), “that five German soldiers were ambushed, resulting in the terrible retribution by Nazi forces and the tragic events of Castello on August 12, 1944.”

  Beyond the cemetery, Oliver was in the countryside.

  Oliver had no point of comparison, really. He was not greatly experienced in love. Which is to say, until he met Anna, he was not experienced at all.

  He once said to Anna that the smell of her hair was what he imagined a forest would be like if he woke in its shadows after a midsummer nap.

  She laughed and said, “You’re crazy.”

  And he kissed the back of her neck and said, “Oh, you’ve got that right.”

  So it wasn’t that Oliver didn’t know he was in love. What he didn’t know (but what any lazy, ancient god could have told him) was that he would never be so happy and so in love again.

  The light was a combination of haze and precision. The cutout hills. The veins of smoke from the little fires at the edge of olive groves.