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Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~The ideas in this book germinated in a quickly drafted article, when Joseph Imorde gave me ten days to plug a gap in a themed issue (on architecture and color) of the now-defunct periodical Daidalos. The subject of colored marbles was just as quickly forgotten, only to be revived as a dissertation topic at Columbia University on the urging of the late Hilary...
PublisherYale University Press
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Acknowledgments
The ideas in this book germinated in a quickly drafted article, when Joseph Imorde gave me ten days to plug a gap in a themed issue (on architecture and color) of the now-defunct periodical Daidalos. The subject of colored marbles was just as quickly forgotten, only to be revived as a dissertation topic at Columbia University on the urging of the late Hilary Ballon. In those early days I was only interested in Early Modern architecture, but fortunately Thomas Dale opened my eyes to the whole field of Byzantine art, David Rosand introduced me to Venice, Richard Brilliant revived my interest in ancient Rome, Anthony Grafton introduced me to sympathetic magic and much besides, and I began dimly to perceive the scope of the subject. My doctoral advisor, Joseph Connors, enthusiastically encouraged me to pursue the topic and proved to be both a model of sage restraint and an enlivening spark; in the final stages he was also a merciless yet humorous enforcer and castigator of my then embroidered style. Above all, I took to heart his words, “You must keep growing,” and it is in this spirit that the present text came to its ultimate form.
It would have been hard to develop my ideas without the two happy years that I spent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.: first as David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts under the aegis of Elizabeth Cropper, and then the illuminating experience of working as an intern in the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts for Nicholas Penny, who wore his erudition lightly and made me look hard. I must also thank Faya Causey, Caroline Elam, Alison Luchs, and Debra Pincus for all their support and suggestions—Caroline Elam also for saving me from a few howlers and vetting my Latin translations. In Rome, which was a recurrent base for research, I had the good fortune to profit from the friendship and erudition of Robert Coates-Stephens, who read early drafts and never forgot to mention, e-mail, and even text the most recondite primary sources or notices of archaeological remains that he thought might interest me. Without his generosity this book would not have been so rich in detail and would probably have been finished some time earlier. In the process I rediscovered my love for Greek and Latin and rekindled my youthful flirtation with archaeology. My original intention had been to study marble symbolism over only two or three centuries (the fifteenth through eighteenth), but as I looked for evidence and slowly grasped the millennial continuity of the themes that took possession of me, it grew and grew and grew. While the final product was wide-ranging, it also wandered widely, so I set about publishing articles and book chapters on particular issues that not only required their own mental space, but that also helped recalibrate my trajectory each time I returned to the greater body of writing. Only fragments of that original dissertation are now preserved in this book. A complete rewriting of the text, which eventually entailed halving it in length while adding three new chapters at the same time, took place at Stanford University, where I reveled in the exceptional resources of the library, the encouragement of my colleagues (especially Nancy Troy and Richard Meyer), and the wider frontiers that art historical writing seemed to offer. It was the financial resources provided by the university that enabled the subvention necessary to publish the book, for which I must thank Debra Satz, Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. A week spent on a restoration course at Yale University, and a “lightbulb moment” when I painted a small patch of fresco for the first time in my life, resulted in the entire argument of Chapter 4. Special thanks go to Caroline Cima, who accompanied me on long trips to find and photograph monuments in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, always with unbridled enthusiasm, and whose observations and queries frequently alerted me to some question I had overlooked or that required greater thought. In the last stages of rewriting, I enjoyed the high spirits and learned discussion of Paul Gwynne, whose help with some particularly difficult translations amounted to an advanced Latin course, from which I hope I will never recover.
I have never conducted research that has met with such interest and friendly support as this book. I hope I will be forgiven by those whose names I have forgotten in the following list, but for references, generosity, and goodwill let me thank: Felix Ackerman, Al Acres, Gwen Ajello, Sam Barnish, Sergio Bettini, Elisabeth Bolman, Dorothy Bosomworth, Spike Bucklow, John Bushell, Deniz Calis, Marietta Cambareri, Robin Cormack, Lucos Cozza†, Maarten Delbeke, Rodney Fitzsimons, Beate Fricke, Milette Gaifman, Sharon Gerstel, Michael Greenhalgh, Chiara Guarnieri, Jeffrey Hamburger, James Harper, Ingo Herklotz, Michael Hill, Salima Ikram, Joseph Imorde, Philippa Jackson, Nate Jones, Duncan Keenan-Jones, Meg Koster, Christopher Krebs, Ann Kuttner, Bob La France, Anne Laidlaw, Didier Laroche, Benedict Leca, Manfred Leithe-Jasper, Estelle and Stuart Lingo, Gitte Loenstrup, Julian Luxford, Ruth Macrides†, Henry Maguire, Flavia Marcello, Vassileios Marinis, the inimitable Robin Middleton, John Mitchell, Jennifer Montagu, Andrew Morrogh, Alexander Nagel, Gülru Necipoglu, Robert Nelson, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Giorgio Ortolani, Irina Oryshkevich, Steven Ostrow, Alessandro Pierattini, Sheryl Reiss, Eva Renzulli, Michael Roberts, Maddalena Scimemi, Cinzia Sicca Bursill-Hall, R. R. R. Smith, Gavin Stamp†, Paul Tegmeyer, Marjorie S. Venit, Rick Vinograd, Alicia Walker, Nicholas Warner, Tristan Weddigen, Claudia Wedepohl, Richard Wittman, Vitale Zanchettin, and Kaspar Zollikofer. In addition, I must thank Katherine Boller at Yale University Press for accepting the project and for providing sustained encouragement and exemplary professionalism, as well as the rest of the Yale team, including Raychel Rapazza, Heidi Downey, Laura Hensley, Tina Henderson, MaryEllen Oliver, and Mary Mayer.
As Pelé Cox has instructed me that under no circumstance should I express any gratitude for the enormous help she gave me in choosing and assembling the final selection of illustrations, as well as many other matters necessary to get this book to press, I will simply thank her for having a poetic soul and marrying me into the bargain. Let me also remember my daughters, Vanessa and Connie, who long suffered, not always silently, my repeated desires to slip into another medieval church or clamber up another Sicilian hill, often in melting heat, to take “just one more photo,” but readily assented when they knew the day would end at a poolside.
I reserve my final thanks for Peter Carl. Peter shaped my architectural thinking as an undergraduate and graduate at the Department of Architecture in the University of Cambridge. It would be better to say that he opened my eyes to what architecture is and how we can usefully speak about it, rooting in me a conviction that the architecture and arts of all eras and cultures assemble in a humane continuum, and therefore that none should be overlooked in their pertinence to the present. Over the intervening years he has continued to be a long-distance companion and interlocutor in my research. Peter read various drafts of this book, sometimes just stray paragraphs, and responded in voluminous e-mails packed with dense commentary and his own insights. They would always lead me down some new path or to a higher ground from which to assess the problem at hand. As even these thanks seem paltry, it is right and fitting to dedicate the book to him as well.
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