"Marble is a metamorphic stone that has been a material of choice and a subject of reflection for millennia. Its geology, history, and economics are well known, but its aesthetics remain understudied. This book sheds new light on the celebration and uses of marble in art and literature and on the iconic potential of the stone. Through empirical research centered on the Mediterranean from late antiquity to the present, it closely examines the artistic versatility of marble in its uses and re-uses, including the marble cladding of architecture, the carving of marble and painting on stone, their political and philosophical connotations, and the de- and re-materializing of marble made possible by digital technology"--Publisher's description.
Introduction : marble, material, and image / Dario Gamboni and Gerhard Wolf -- Marble metamorphosis / Gerhard Wolf -- Churches and mosques : aesthetics and transfer of marble in early Islam / Mattia Guidetti -- Sacred marbles and holy spots in Rome : interpretations and re-interpretations in the Middle Ages / Daniela Mondini -- "From the highest heaven" : a Renaissance pax and a vision in marble / Jessica N. Richardson -- Style and the aesthetic of surface in architecture from Alberti to Michelangelo / Alina Payne -- Painting on marble : reflections on the meaning of stone supports / Johanna Beate Lohff -- For God and for the king : the elaboration of a symbolic use of marble in the Ancien Régime / Sophie Mouquin -- Attending to marble in eighteenth-century Britain / Malcolm Baker -- The animetic aesthetic of marbling / Raphael Rosenberg -- From wood to marble : altarpieces and devotional sculpture in Buenos Aires, Lima, and Santiago during the second half of the nineteenth century / Fernando Guzmán, Diego Fernando Guerra, and Paolo Piaresi -- The discourse of marble in the Spanish Caribbean : the case of the Capitolio Nacional in Havana / Maria Ocón Fernández -- Sober opulence : marble in the architecture of Adolf Loos / Marie Theres Stauffer -- Marble after modernism / Adrian Forty -- The non-finito in Auguste Rodin's marble oeuvre / Christine Wohlrab -- Between material and text : marble's material culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries / Alexandra Parigoris -- The quarry and the tower : filming marble's architectural anticipations / Spyros Papapetros -- Articulate stones in the digital age : "wrinkles, scars, blotches, bruises, fractures, mutilations, amputations, dislocations, and restorations" / Adam Lowe and Charlotte Skene Catling -- Marble for iconophiles and iconophobes / Dario Gamboni.