It looks like a storm rolling in, a tornado perhaps, an earthly object as dynamic as the skies of Italy. More alive is the marble behind them, quarried from the Apuan Alps of northern Tuscany. The black and white figures appear sad or tired, slumped on horseback. I stopped by a small stone mosaic of white chalcedony, soft stones, and marble depicting valkyrie. The bust, made in the 16th century, is presented alongside a Neo-Assyrian stamp seal made of lapis lazuli from the late 8th to 7th century, exhibiting the long history of this stone - still popular in crystal shops today - with beauty, power and the spirit. On the other end of the gallery, a white marble bust of Christ attributed to Giovanni Battista Della Porta is embellished with blue lapis lazuli that was aligned with the Virgin Mary and purple-red stone connected with divinity and empire. As the exhibition text notes, the “constancy of the stone flowers compared to the ephemeral ones outside associated them with the garden of paradise, especially given the memorial function of the building.” A detailed watercolor panel from the entrance to the Taj Mahal is decorated with gorgeous floral designs. One important theme apparent in the show is the spiritual quality of stone. Blow arranged albarese limestone into a stone mosaic to create the sense of a landscape. An untitled landscape designed by Richard Blow, manufactured by Monitici Workshop in Florence, is an example of a pietra paesina, or landscape stone. A marble slab from Yunnan, China, is presented as is, cut into the shape of a circle to help highlight its natural whites and grays, which look like a cloud or running stream. 1954), mosaic of soft stones, hard stones, and marblesĪnd as anyone who’s visited a rock desert or collected crystals might recognize, sometimes stones themselves have their own painterly qualities. Opificio delle Pietre Dure (maker), Renato Bittoni (designer), “Valchirie” (c. Leonard Bramer’s “The Liberation of Saint Peter” is an oil painting that uses slate to capture the essence of the stone walls of a prison that might have held the Biblical figure. Peter, whose name derives from the Greek petra, or stone. In Stone for Stone, works made of stone depict stone, which makes for an especially apt metaphor of St. The exhibition is organized around a few core themes, as in Fooling the Eye, which includes trompe l’oeil works such as a table with a still life that looks like a painting but is in fact made entirely of stones, marble, coral, and rock crystal.
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