Painting in Stone: architecture and the poetics of marble from antiquity to the enlightenment

Painting in Stone: architecture and the poetics of marble from antiquity to the enlightenment, Fabio Barry, Yale University Press, 2022, 432 pages, 214 colour and 116 black-and-white illustrations, paperback.

Abbot Suger: recreating the Heavenly Jerusalem in his church interiors

Fabio Barry’s book is about marble architecture, but his approach is novel. The clue is in the subtitle: ‘the Poetics of Marble’. This is not so much a history of marble in architecture as a history of the meanings of marble. Marble is usually associated with prestige, ostentation and imperial power; porphyry was reserved for emperors. Barry, however, finds a much more capacious range of meanings by considering contemporary commentaries, in particular the literature of the ekphrasis – rhetorical exercises in which words were used to describe the appearance of a work of art or architecture, to rival and surpass the purely visual qualities of the original work.

With marble, what often interests the writers of these ekphrastic poems is light, sheen and glitter, rather than the marble itself, and they make no distinction between marble and other substances that possess these qualities. Accordingly, Barry includes other marble-like materials in his survey: glass, gems, hardstones, rock crystal, alabaster, stones that resemble marble such as Purbeck limestone, even faux marble (surfaces painted with veining to resemble marble).

Barry presents us with a succession of buildings ranging from ancient Mesopotamian temples, through Byzantine churches to renaissance and baroque chapels, interpreting them through lavish quotations from the literature. He draws out three overarching themes from these texts.

The first concerns the seeming ability of polished marble to transmit light. Buildings widely spaced in date and location – Sumerian ziggurats, Greek temples and Christian churches – were all described as radiant and shimmering, filled with light that evoked heavenly spheres where gods or god-like rulers dwelt. Barry instances the inner chamber of the Parthenon, with shining walls of Pentelic marble, and daylight filtering through the translucent marble roof on to Phidias’s colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena standing in a reflective pool. The effect is to bring the presence of the goddess to earth. This is essentially the same process described by the 12th century Abbot Suger, who recreated the Heavenly Jerusalem in his church interiors through the radiance of stained glass, and the use of gems and translucent stones for ritual vessels.

The second theme is the perception of marble as living rock, based on pre-modern theories of geology. The earth was thought of as a living body with veins of water coursing through it, marble being its petrified image. Barry highlights the use of travertine in Roman buildings, as the rock that most effectively communicated ideas of marble’s watery origin and petrifaction; and he cites the many different coloured and veined marbles imported from the far reaches of the Augustine empire, as representing the foreign lands conquered by the emperor. The marble-clad interior of Hagia Sophia was described in terms of petrified nature: columns as tree trunks, capitals as baskets of fruit and leaves, with the floor compared to a frozen sea, a metaphor also employed at San Marco, Venice, where the marble panels in the centre of the mosaic floor are known as ‘il mare’.

A third theme running through the book is the idea that the veining and patterning of marble is a form of natural or divine painting, an artform in itself. At Hagia Sophia there are no painted images on the walls, only book-matched panels of marble, which some thought rivalled painting. Elsewhere, figures perceived in the veining – images of saints or the Virgin – were held to be of divine origin, while marble with red veining was a manifestation of Christ: at the Lateran Palace, the marble steps of the Scala Sancta were said to come from Pilate’s Palace in Jerusalem, where they were spattered with drops of blood from Christ’s body after the flagellation. Barry also cites the marbles often pictured in Venetian paintings, such as the slab flecked with red on which Mantegna’s Dead Christ lies, representing the Stone of Unction, on which Christ’s body rested after being taken from the cross.

The book highlights changes in the availability of marbles that affected their use. Marble was hardly used in medieval churches in western Europe because most of the quarries had ceased to function, whereas in the east a few quarries survived, so that marble revetments were frequent in Byzantine churches. When Renaissance architects such as Alberti and Raphael began to use marble in a revival of ancient practices, they had to use spolia taken from ruined classical buildings. Demand increased so much that by the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII had to prohibit the scavenging of ancient marbles from classical remains.

Gregory was a key figure in the revival of coloured marbles. His burial chapel at St Peter’s by della Porta made extensive use of them. It was the subject of the most expansive ekphrasis since Byzantium, which identified the different marbles, comparing them with flower fields, patterned textiles, flowing rivers, mountain peaks and rocks. By the time Bernini came to design his Cornaro Chapel, with the statue of St Teresa floating on marble clouds, breaking down the barriers between painting, sculpture and architecture, new quarries had opened, giving architects a much greater choice of colours and veining.

A short review can not do justice to the wealth of material in this beautifully illustrated book. Although some of the ekphrases can be repetitive, and Barry’s text is heavy going at times, it is well worth reading.

This article originally appeared as ‘Meanings of marble’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 176, published in June 2023. It was written by Julian Treuherz, art historian and curator.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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