Bathroom Countertops at OldGraniteAndMarble.us

• Carrara countertops
• Behind Carrara for bathroom
• Carrara is Italy's attractions
• Carrara - artwork in progress
• Home of bulls
• Carrara workshops

Carrara workshops

Like other Carrara workshops, SGF carves sculptures for some of the world's top contemporary artists. It comes as news to many visitors that these artists do not themselves execute their works. It shouldn't: For the last five centuries the distinction between scultore (a marble-carving technician) and artista (an artist) has been clearly defined in Carrara. Mario Fruendi, a partner at SGF, chuckled as he told me, "You can count on the fingers of both hands heroic figures such as Giambologna, Michelangelo or Canova who conceived their sculptures, selected their stones from Carrara's quarries and then carved them."
Since its founding in the early 1970s, SGF has produced, among others, the monumental works of Julio Silva (Pygmalion, at Les Halles in Paris), Richard Erdman (The Passage, commissioned by Pepsi Cola for its White Plains headquarters), Max Bill (Continuitat II, at 320 tons the heaviest sculpture in the world ever transported, now at Deutschebank's head office in Frankfurt), Roland Balladi (1954 Cadillac, a life-sized sculpture carved from a single block of marble).
While I was there, a pair of huge marble hands designed by Larry Kirkland were being carved into life. Set on top of columns, they will soon be erected in front of the Internal Revenue Service's Washington, D.C., offices. Apt symbolism, I thought.
The 18th-century sculpture workshops of Carlo Nicoli, in the center of old Carrara, have been in the Nicoli family for six generations and are Carrara's most atmospheric. An Aladdin's Cave of busts and statues, the studios are shrouded by an inch-thick layer of pale dust.

Welling up out of the gloom are Garibaldi, Gladstone, Disraeli, Christ and Queen Victoria. Nicoli showed me records proving that about 300 Queen Victoria marble portrait busts have been sculpted here, though it's unclear whether they were originals made by his great-grandfather or copies made for the royal family.
On a typical day at the Nicoli workshops, you might see half a dozen visiting art students from around the world carrying out their own projects. Or Nicoli's team of artisans producing a sculpture or portrait bust for famous clients such as Wendy Taylor, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cesar or Daniel Cafri.
You would expect to find Europe's most skilled marble artisans and stonemasons in Carrara. What surprised me is that in 2,000 years the city has produced virtually no artists of renown. The possible exception is Pietro Tenerani, a contemporary of Canova. Two of Tenerani's technically peerless statues, allegories of Hunting and Fishing (1828), are at Carrara's Academy of Fine Arts, in the former Cybo-Malaspina palace.
The fact is, art represents only a tiny percentage of marble's uses. "Sculpture is to marble what Ferrari is to the automobile industry - a prestigious niche production," said my guide Lorenzo Marchini. "The building trades are the Fiat of marble - the real thing."
Many Carraresi firmly believe that architecture, not art, is marble's supreme expression. The most popular heroes around here are not Michelangelo or Canova, but the builders and architects of the world, from the ancient Roman Vitruvius to the mannerist Andrea Palladio, or contemporaries such as I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli and Richard Rogers.
As the millennium approaches, I find it comforting to know that the quarries of antiquity - and the anonymous master artisans whose families have worked them for millennia - are still turning out the stone that graces great art collections and dresses outstanding buildings around the world. Carrara's traditions really are set in stone.
Paris-based David Downie's work has appeared in the Travel Section and the San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine. His last piece, in the magazine, was about Maastricht.