Questions for Eric Scigliano
	Collezione Fabbioni-Morescalchi What made you decide to write a book about Michelangelo? Actually, I didn’t originally set out to. I envisioned “The Marble Mountain,” a book on Carrara, its quarries, ancient stonecarving traditions and the marble mystique. Michelangelo was to be a part of that—a chapter called “Michelangelo’s Mountain.” But he came to loom larger and larger, just as he did in every art form he undertook. It soon became apparent that his life was the driving narrative, interwoven with the story of Carrara and the stone and intersecting it in all sorts of surprising ways.
	So why did you set out to write about Carrara, then? Like most ideas, it had several births. I suppose the seed was planted when I was a kid and my grandmother would talk about Carrara and the mountains where her ancestors worked, and the marble that her father carved. It all came to seem quite fabulous and romantic, like everything about Italy. Then I learned that we still had cousins there. When I traveled around Italy in 1984 and ’85—the coldest winter there in a hundred years—I tried to get in touch with them. But no one answered; it turned out their number was misprinted in the phone book. I finally sent a telegram, but theirs arrived just after I left Florence. I hopped off the train at Carrara on my way from Rome to Milan, but everything was buried in snow and I had no one to call, so I boarded the next train. We did connect by mail later, and when I returned to Italy I looked them up. Luigi Brotini, the head of the family, was a fabulous host. He ran a business, which is father had started, making cutters, abrasives, and adhesives for stone work, and he knows people all over the local quarries and workshops. He drove us on a madcap ride, day after day, meeting them and seeing the sights, from the top of the mountain to bottom. I was absolutely blown away by the visual and human panorama there.
	But isn’t it a scene of devastation? © 2005 Eric Scigliano Yeah, but what devastation! Two thousand years of extractive industry in this one spot, from Roman through medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Napoleonic, and modern times. And for all the earth and rock that’s been moved, the streams choked and the forests leveled, it’s a strangely clean devastation. It’s not toxic coal slurry or cyanide runoff, just good old calcium carbonate, the main constituent of marble. It’s the same calcium people swallow in vitamin pills and drink in orange juice. In fact, a lot of the calcium in food supplements—not to mention paint and paper and a gazillion other things—comes from Carrarava’s leftover marble waste. You might say there’s a little Carrara in all of us.
	And then there’s that mountain panorama you describe... That’s right. It’s wonderfully weird to sit on the beach in Carrara—the first sandy beach you reach heading south along the Riviera, past the Cinque Terre—and look up to see, just five miles away, crazily steep mountains that seem covered with snow in the middle of summer. The “snowcaps” and “glaciers” are rubble left behind by quarrying. They’re the largest trompe l’oeil effect ever shaped by human hands. In a way, the mountains themselves are the greatest marble sculpture of all
	Would Michelangelo have agreed? Probably not, but he was blown away by these mountains, just like everyone else who’s seen them, from Pliny to Dante to Dickens to modern travelers. Dante described them in the Inferno and seems to have modeled his circles of hell, and maybe Purgatory Mountain as well, on the quarry cliffs and terraces. Michelangelo even dreamed of carving one into a personal Mount Rushmore, visible to the “sailors at sea.”
	So he really did spend some time there? Yep, two years or more, over the course of about two dozen trips. At the midpoint of his career, when he was in his thirties and forties, Carrara and the Apuan quarries were the third pole in his life and work, after Florence and Rome. And they shaped him, just as he shaped the stone he found here. They changed the course of his life, though not necessarily for the better.
	What do you mean? The marble was Michelangelo’s passion—he evoked it as a sort of lover in his poetry and treated it as one in his sculpture, like a latter-day Pygmalion breathing life into stone. But it was also his curse. His periods in the quarries came at critical junctures in his work, but they led to worse and worse outcomes. He first came in 1498, when he was just 23 years old, to find the stone for the Vatican Pietà, one of the world’s most beloved sculptures. That was a hard slog—it took six months to get the stone shipped to Rome—but it led to an unalloyed triumph. Then he came back, in 1505, after another triumph, the David, seeking much more marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Again, he succeeded magnificently at the quarrying and shipping. But the tomb itself turned out to be one of history’s great exercises in creative frustration—50 years of toil, delay, intrigue, and vituperation. It’s amazing the guy still wanted to touch a hammer and chisel after all that. Then came the San Lorenzo Church façade. Again, Michelangelo conceived a bigger project than anyone could finish in a lifetime, even if nothing went wrong. And of course everything did go wrong, from tumbling marble columns that nearly killed him, to a trade war between the Carrara marble masters and the Medici rulers of Florence and Rome, which he got caught in the middle of, to the wars that were consuming Italy and would soon spread across Europe. Everyone knows about the agonies he suffered painting the Sistine Chapel, but that was sheer ecstasy compared to the years he spent trying to get the marble and finish the tomb and façade.
	© 2005 Eric Scigliano Has all this been told before? Some biographies of Michelangelo just touch on these events, others treat them in more detail. But none recount the whole saga, though there’s an incredibly rich documentary record to work with. The correspondence between Michelangelo and the various parties he had to command, train, coax along, fend off, play off against each other—quarry owners, stoneworkers, shippers, marchesi, popes, Vatican functionaries, Florentine officials, rival artists—composes this incredibly rich, complex drama. At times it’s so intimate, I felt I was eavesdropping—on conversations in 16th-century Florentine dialect.
	It’s not available in English? All Michelangelo’s letters—nearly 500—were published in translation 42 years ago, and a few of the more important letters to him have been translated. But the bulk of those are only available in Italian. And I uncovered a couple letters between other parties involved with him that seem to have escaped even the Italian scholars, who’ve done an amazing job of collecting and transcribing. One, from the head of the Florentine republic to the marchese of Carrara, was apparently overlooked because it was misdated. It sheds some interesting light on another great unconsummated project, the colossal Hercules that Michelangelo was supposed to carve to stand next to the David, which got kibboshed because the Medici didn’t want any more symbols of liberty to stir up the populace.
	Sounds like a find. . . It was exciting, especially since I’d felt rather spooked writing about Michelangelo, and hardly expected to make any new findings.
	Why’s that? Because there’s been so much written about the guy already. A 1970 bibliography ran to 3,000 entries, and the tally’s probably doubled since. But I was amazed how much there was to say. The popular biographies and newspaper articles tend to retrace the same ground and perpetuate the same myths, and the scholarly writing tends to be highly specific and often arcane. In between there’s a surprising space for writing that tries to tell a story, venture strong interpretations, and still be rigorous with the facts.
	Study like a scholar, write like a novelist? That’s the challenge, though it’s not always an easy balance. Fun, though. I suppose Michelangelo would understand. He was a popular artist with some very lofty ideas.
	Besides the strength of his connection to Carrara, did anything else you learned about him surprise you? I was impressed at the complexity and intense ambivalence of his relationships with the Medici. There’s been a conscious effort, even today, to cast Michelangelo as a creature of the Medici, a court artist like his biographer Vasari. Three years ago a big show assembled by the Accademia di Belle Arte and Opifico delle Pietre Dure in Florence—two Medici-founded institutions—toured the US. It was called “The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence,” and it flaunted a spurious connection with the Medici dukes who held power from the mid-sixteenth century on. Cosimo I, the first Medici duke, schemed and pleaded to co-opt Michelangelo, which would legitimize his rule. But Michelangelo refused to do any work for or even return to Florence after Cosimo seized power. He had to tread lightly to protect his family there, but there’s no doubting his republican sentiments. He helped lead the armed rebellion against Pope Clement, formerly Giulio de’Medici, even though Clement was his lifelong friend and the wisest patron he’d ever had. He carved a bust of the Roman tyrant-slayer Brutus to honor the assassin of the vicious Alessandro de’Medici. It’s a fascinating political, psychological, and creative entanglement. I’ve tried to outline it in Michelangelo’s Mountain, but I could write a whole other book on it.
	What does that have to do with Carrara and the marble? Collezione Fabbioni-Morescalchi A lot. The saga of Michelangelo and the Medici is all tied up with the struggle for marble. Sometimes it even turned on that struggle. Pope Leo’s decision to make Michelangelo abandon Carrara and develop the Seravezza quarries was decisive and disastrous, nearly fatal. Likewise the 25-year-long battle over the giant block that Michelangelo was supposed to carve his Hercules from. Baccio Bandinelli, a Salieri-like figure who haunted Michelangelo’s traces for decades, finally scored the block and the commission after the Medici regained power and carved the most hated statue in Florence—a brutal symbol of tyranny standing beside Michelangelo’s graceful champion of liberty, the David. More than that, Michelangelo’s and his fellow Florentines’ fight for freedom matches the whole history of Carrara. The carrarini are famously stubborn, bloody-minded people—,teste dure, hard like the stone they work. You can hear it their dialect, which sounds like chisels clinking. They’ve been fighting outside powers, from the Roman legions to Vikings, Saracens, robber bishops, Fascists, storm troopers, and multinational companies, for more than 2,000 years. Carrara was the seedbed of the Italian labor and anarchist movements. L’anarchia still dominates the political culture there, for better and worse; it’s passionate and generous-spirited, but not always efficient.
	So past and present overlap there? Not just overlap, they intermingle, cohabitate. Living in Carrara—for as long a spell as Michelangelo did on his longest foray there—I came to feel like Kurt Vonnegutt’s Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time.” I’d tramp from the quarries to the archives to the cantinas where I’d meet the cavatori and scultori, then back to a little rented room with a big view, where I’d peck away and try to puzzle out the texts and interviews. And all the time I felt like I was passing between eras, traveling with Michelangelo, Dante, the ancient slaves, the wartime partisans, our own ancestors attacking the mountain with picks and blasting powder, on and on. Or rather, living in different times simultaneously, as people do in a place like Carrara. That’s the layered experience I tried to capture in the book. Compared to that, here-and-now in our own always up-to-the-minute country seems rather dull and impoverished.

© 2005 Eric Scigliano