The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane

of tombs, palatial lintels, and crumbled ruins, marble has never seemed new. Even in the Renaissance, the popularity of white Carrara marble had a good deal to do with its automatic allusion to antiquity—an allusion that was never on very solid ground, as a matter of fact. The artists and the great patrons of the quattrocento either didn’t know or chose to overlook the fact that it had been weather, not noble refinement of taste, that had washed away the gaudy colours with which the ancient Greeks painted their heroic stone figures.
    “Marble has been carved for centuries in Pietrabella’s famous workshops.” This must surely have been a caption on one of your annual projects for a history or geography class when you were little.
    I could have helped. I could have told you that it was Elisa Baciocchi, the princess of Lucca and grand duchess of Tuscany, who, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, saw the possibilities of the souvenir industry. She established the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Carrara—an initiative designed to make the region an exporter of finished sculpture as well as raw stone. Dozens of new studio workshops established in the bustling streets of Carrara were the result.
    Elisa’s intention was too commercial to be strictly artistic—but she was one of those great benefactors of the arts whose generosity depends on misunderstanding. These were reproductions, after all. Not art. But the idea of reproduction was not yet ubiquitous, and mediocrity was not part of the princess’s thinking. Beautifully carved Venetian lions in the publicgardens of provincial towns, surprisingly detailed Bernini paperweights on the desks of actuaries, quarter-size
Cupid and Psyches
beneath the palm fronds of hotel foyers, devotedly transposed
Davids
beside Royal Doulton figurines on mantelpieces, and marble busts of her brother in antique stores everywhere owed their existence to Napoleon’s youngest and most culturally ambitious sister.
    A sad thought—your being little. It’s an odd regret to have—with so many others from which to choose—but I am very sorry to have never helped you glue
National Geographic
photographs of mountain peaks, and quarry workers, and dusty-white artisans to bristol board for a grade school assignment. I would have liked that.
    When I was with your mother she spent her days—as I’m sure she spends them now—working marble with her battered wooden mallet and her chisels, her points, her punches, her drills and rasps, her sandpapers and emery. And with her tanned, strong arms. I loved watching her work. She was always at the side of the farmhouse, in her shorts and construction boots. She could work for hours without saying a word. She never gave any warning when she was about to speak.
    Anna was pushing the back of her wrist across the sweaty white dust on her brow when she said that she didn’t think our meeting was an accident. She said that she believed it was marble that brought us together. She thought the evidence was indisputable.
    But I couldn’t see it. Not at first, anyway. Marble seemed to have nothing to do with what had happened to us.
    When you place your hand on Carrara marble—whether a piece of sculpture or a bathroom tile—there is always something sepulchral in the sensation. Its cold beauty seems to belong to the same realm of time as the distant stars.
    Anna’s warm skin and dark, rosemary-scented hair were the very opposite of marble. Or that’s how I thought of her. If there were
memento mori
carved into the frame of those four summer months—skeletons and skulls and Grim Reapers in the overgrown hedge that surrounded the property on which the farmhouse stood—I didn’t see them. I’ve never been further from death. Anna brought something to me that I was simultaneously young enough and old enough to enjoy most completely. But white stone is not the medium I’d choose were I ever to describe what that something was.
    On the surface, there were