The Road That Michaelangelo Built To Mine Marble

A document from 1501 refers to a massive barely begun statue a certain man of marble named david badly blocked out and laid on its back in the courtyard the stone was a leftover from a long running decorative project.

The road that michaelangelo built to mine marble.

500 years have passed since michelangelo forged his marble road extending from seravezza to the heel of the trambiserra and cappella quarries. With the blessing of pope leo x michelangelo designed a path that could get blocks of the white marble down from the mountain to be transported to florence to be used to decorate the facade of the. The family created the office of marble in 1564 to regulate the marble mining industry. In the 17th and 18th centuries the marble quarries were monitored by the cybo and malaspina families who ruled over massa and carrara.

At seravezza 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. In the three centuries following michelangelo s time the altissimo quarries went through. The marble road of the cervaiole quarry winds through monte altissimo photographed on july 14 2017. Although the film footage below of work in the quarries of carrara shown here is contemporary it powerfully evokes the arduous physical work the dangers at hand and the large scale of the stones.

Until the late 19th century the process of extracting marble from the mountains had remained little changed since michelangelo s time. Carrara marble has been used since the time of ancient rome and it was called the luni marble. After finding the right stone michelangelo would have hired a crew of cavatori or quarrymen and scarpellini or stone carvers to cut blocks out of the mountain. It s the marble memory of michelangelo that makes the strongest.

2 the block of marble that michelangelo used to carve david had been worked on more than 50 years earlier by donatello. Marble caves of carrara. In 1408 the committee had decided to decorate the roofline around the dome of the cathedral with massive statues of. Michelangelo chose carrara marble for his acclaimed pietà statue kept in st peter s basilica in the vatican which depicts the body of christ on the lap of his mother mary after his crucifixion.

Michelangelo s david is massive at 17 feet tall and more than 12 000 pounds yet it is sculpted from a single block of white marble. The city of massa in particular saw much of its plan.