Human intention lined in white is not always grimly fateful. Herman Melville in a chapter-long digression from the hunt for Moby-Dick meditates on how ‘whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls’. Two of these three, it is no surprise to find, are calcium white. Japonica is the exception: white in nature where it is not mineral–real white horses, white bears, white elephants, the albino and the albatross–is attributable not to calcium but to the arrangement of organic matter into cells in such a way that it scatters light of all colours. Melville’s famous whale displays whiteness of both kinds, for while its skin is white due to absence of other pigments, its ivory teeth are impregnated with calcium salts.
The composite structure of ivory, a tough fibrous matrix with a stony hard infill, has made it a pleasing medium for the artist. Ivory has been carved since ancient times. The seagoing Phoenicians decorated the calcareous remnants of creatures they found in and around the Mediterranean, including the tusks of hippopotami. But it was the growth of the whaling industry in the nineteenth century that gave rise to the craft of scrimshaw, an art which is romantically supposed to be the creative by-product of sailors’ long hours spent on the oceans in search of leviathan. The scrimshanders’ favourite medium was the massive teeth of the sperm whales that were their primary quarry, although narwhal horns and walrus tusks–both evolutionary mutations of teeth–were not wasted. They engraved images of ships and maps and patriotic subjects as well as women in mermaidenly states of undress, the fine grain of the material lending itself well to the fine-lined execution of rigging or tumbling hair, and attaining, as Melville wrote, a quality of sculpture ‘as close packed in its maziness of design’ as the prints of Dürer.
The most exalted material in both sculpture and architecture, together known as the monumental arts, has always been marble, the purest and whitest form of calcium carbonate that responds to the artist’s chisel. Ancient Greece and Rome achieved their resplendence partly because marble quarries lay near by. Phidias used Pentelic marble from the mountains near Athens for the construction of the Parthenon, an experiment in stonework whose muscular Doric columns reflect its structural engineer’s caution in adapting traditional wooden construction. Somewhat coarser in grain, Parian marble came from the island of Paros, and was employed at sites away from Attica, such as Delphi, Corinth and Cape Sounion.
Roman monuments from the Pantheon to Trajan’s Column were built of marble shipped from the famous quarries at Carrara on the Tuscan coast. Carrara’s Sant’Andrea cathedral is remarkable because the entire structure is made of marble–an inevitable decision perhaps, but one with the unfortunate consequence of producing an interior as grim as a cave. Other great cathedrals made more artful use of the Carrara stone, the Lego stripes of white and dark green marble that run round the exterior and interior of the thirteenth-century duomo in Siena being one striking example. My favourite Italian cathedral, however, is the one which stands like a jewelled box on the table-top hill of Orvieto. Seen from a side street, tightly framed by ordinary houses, its west front shines with a soft white light, a glow of celestial bliss. From another angle, its Gothic finials cluster together like the sparkling skyscrapers of a great metropolis, an Emerald City, a Jerusalem indeed. Inside, the windows along the nave are not glazed but finished with thin sheets of the same marble. They admit a soothing light that casts no shadow.
Michelangelo chose Carrara marble for many of his most important works, and made frequent excursions to Carrara to select the blocks for David and other sculptures from the whitest statuario grade marble. These visits provided a temporary refuge from whichever pope was making unreasonable demands upon him at the time. When things were going well, however, Michelangelo worked in Rome, while his favoured stone-cutter Topolino sent him consignments of stone, among which he would often include a sculptural effort of his own, to the invariable mirth of the great artist.
One project of great personal significance to Michelangelo was the tomb of Pope Julius II, begun when Julius died in 1513 and continued off and on through the reigns of five subsequent pontiffs. The work was never completed according to plan, but its several statues show the artist at his technical best. Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo’s apprentice and biographer and the sculptor of his tomb, found the figure of Moses so handsome and realistic that ‘one cries out for his countenance to be veiled, so dazzling and resplendent does it appear and so perfectly has Michelangelo expressed in marble the divinity that God first infused in Moses’ most holy form.’
The greatest fully realized marble creation of the Renaissance is unsurprisingly another sepulchral work: the Medici chapel and tombs, laid out by Michelangelo and completed by Vasari. It is the prototype of modern art’s ‘white cube’, the neutral space in which pure light reveals the truth of the artist’s vision.
After Michelangelo, sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Antonio Canova pushed Carrara marble to new and opposing extremes of expressive excess and Classical virtue, each prizing it for the homogeneous whiteness that left the viewer with nothing to distract from the brilliance of the carving. Linked to this tradition by their choice of material, modern sculptors in marble cannot help but invoke the spirit of Classical antiquity. For Barbara Hepworth and her peers in the 1920s, determined to revive the art of stone-carving and obeisant to the dictum of ‘truth to materials’, marble provided the purest signal of intent. ‘White was the colour of spirituality,’ according to her biographer. ‘In Barbara’s white studio, with grey shadows, white paint, and white stone, the radio was tuned to Stravinsky and early music.’ Throughout her career, Hepworth produced smooth abstract forms–single stones, pairs and triplets, stones nested or stacked, solid or pierced with holes–in alabaster, Portland stone and marble. White marble was best, always seeming to her to reflect a brighter, more Mediterranean light. Hepworth discovered the material early on when she visited Carrara and learnt to carve from a Roman marmista. But a trip to Greece in 1954 following the break-up of her marriage to the artist Ben Nicholson and the loss of her first son in a flying accident became a pilgrimage of artistic rededication, leading to a series of sculptures named after mythic figures and Classical sites such as Mykonos and Mycenae, executed in the most perfect translucent white marble. She selected the material to ensure the focus was always on the form, but also as a demonstration of sculpture’s organic birth in the landscape, and to forge a new link in the chain that runs through Phidias and Michelangelo from the chalk figures in the hills of prehistory.
The cycle of life and death never stops, of course. Calcium is good for you, we are told. We are exhorted to drink milk and eat cheese in order to maintain our bones and teeth. (Chalk and cheese may be different in many respects, but they are alike in having a high calcium content.) We take calcium supplements–chalk reshaped into smooth, elongated pills like mini Hepworths or ancient sarcophagi.
Pliny tells the ultimate calcium supplement story in his Natural History. When Cleopatra was courting Marcus Antonius, she sought to impress the jaded Roman by announcing that she would throw the most expensive banquet ever given. The day came and the usual fare made its appearance, rich enough but hardly the ten million sesterces’ worth the queen had promised. Antonius protested, and then Cleopatra summoned the main course. The servant set before her a single glass of vinegar. As Antonius grew more bemused, Cleopatra removed one of her pearl earrings, the largest pearls ever known, inherited from the kings of the East, and dropped it in the vinegar, waited for it to dissolve, drank the liquor and claimed her wager.
Literary scholars have disputed this story. Recent editions of the Natural History are footnoted with the received wisdom that the acetic acid of vinegar is not strong enough to dissolve pearls, and suggest that ‘Cleopatra no doubt swallowed the pearl (undissolved) and subsequently recovered it in the natural course of events.’ Chemists, however, disagree, and experiments using cultured pearls have shown that they will dissolv
e in ordinary wine vinegar to yield a potable if disgusting cocktail.
Either way, the concoction can have done no lasting harm. Cleopatra is said, of course, to have poisoned herself more effectively using an asp to take her own life when she learnt of the suicide of Marcus Antonius after his defeat at the Battle of Actium. The whereabouts of her tomb, and whether she shares it with her Roman lover, has excited great speculation among archaeologists. If found, its treasures might surpass those of Tutenkhamun and Nefertiti. The focus of attention recently has been among the limestone ruins of the temple of Isis and Osiris at Taposiris Magna south of Alexandria. The chief evidence to date is a small bust of a woman, unearthed in 2008. Unfortunately, the nose is rubbed off, making it hard to say whether or not it represents the queen of Egypt. It is carved in whitest alabaster.
The Guild of Aerospace Welders
At his studio in rural Suffolk, David Poston greets me with a crushing handshake, and ushers me indoors. David is a jeweller and metalworker, and the reason I have come to see him is that among the chosen materials of his craft is the element titanium. The cluttered space in which I find myself looks much as you would expect a metalworking room to look. The dominant colours are grimy greys and browns. Hammers and other hand-tools lie about, and the aroma of flux pervades the air, as welcoming in its way as the smell of warm bread from a bakery.
Unusually, Poston’s studio also has an upstairs, and this is laboratory-white. Under a tailored plastic dustcover in the middle of the room is his largest piece of equipment–the laser. Perhaps because they are intimidated by its reputation in aerospace and other glamorous modern industries, many craft workers regard titanium as impossible to work with. But to David, an engineer and inventor as well as a craftsman, it holds no terrors. True, it is hard, and has a higher melting point even than iron, but it has compensating virtues that make it worth the graft. It is light as well as tough, and can take on a beautiful patina.
Titanium may be cut and hammered but not soldered. Joining pieces of titanium is a matter of specialist welding, which is why David has bought the laser. He treated himself to it instead of a new car. ‘Much more fun,’ he says as he sits me down at the silent machine. I pass my hands through two armholes to reach into the welding chamber where I pick up two thin pieces of titanium sheet. With one in each hand, I put my eyes to the binocular viewfinder and bring them together, trying to focus on the angle they make under the crosshair sights. With trepidation, I gently depress a foot pedal to operate the laser. I feel a preparatory whoosh of argon across my fingers, sweeping away the oxygen near the metal that would cause it to burn away under the laser’s heat. Then, with a sharp click-click-click, the regular pulses of the laser. An intense white flash–tinged with green unless my eyes are tricked by the bright light–bursts from the metal with each pulse. I move the metal pieces along, endeavouring to hold the angle where they meet in the crosshairs to create a reasonably tidy weld line. The temperature must reach at least 1,660 degrees Celsius to melt the metal, yet the beam is so tightly focused that I can hold the titanium pieces with my unprotected fingers just millimetres away.
The elements with which we have the closest relationship naturally tend to be those we’ve known the longest. Through centuries of smelting and pouring, hammering and beating, the ancient metals have acquired more or less settled cultural associations. Gold is the universal precious metal, signifying wealth, regality and immortality. Iron is the element of manhood, strength and war. White silver is the badge of virginal purity and the feminine. Lead, tin and copper, the other metals known to the ancients, have their particular significances too. These meanings are not the product of ideal knowledge, nor of mere long acquaintance, but of man’s intimate physical association over centuries of bending them to his own ends.
That it is the intimacy of the relationship that matters and not its duration is proven by the metallic elements that have been revealed by modern science. For those of them that have proven to be of the greatest utility, like zinc and aluminium, have picked up their own distinctive cultural baggage even in the relatively short time we have known them. Materials are ‘culturally consequent’, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently pointed out: ‘The attribution of ethical human qualities–honesty, modesty, virtue–into materials does not aim at explanation; its purpose is to heighten our consciousness of the materials themselves and in this way to think about their value.’ However abstract the human qualities attributed to various materials–grave lead, honest tin, virtuous silver–they may always be traced back to the intrinsic physical and chemical properties which the craftsman has so much time to contemplate as he struggles to shape them to his will.
What then of titanium? Despite its futuristic aura, the metal has in fact been readily available to craft workers for fifty years. Is it consolidating its meaning? ‘Titanium offers lots of opportunities, but people are not being quick to find them,’ David tells me. Its behaviour is well understood within heavy manufacturing industry. He describes how at Aérospatiale they weld up Airbus frames in an argon-filled hangar, the technicians going about their work wearing full breathing apparatus. This wherewithal is beyond any artist’s studio, of course. But more importantly, the specialist expertise developed in these commercial environments has not been passed on in any kind of primer for general use. The secrets of the aerospace titanium welders are in effect as safe as those of the medieval guilds which once guarded the goldsmith’s craft.
So people like David must rely on imagination and practical trial and error. ‘It’s empirical, and that’s a lot of the fun,’ he says gamely. Laser aside, David also uses the more traditional metalworkers’ tools. He has an assortment of anvils and a kind of steel forearm that rises from one workbench like the Lady of the Lake, which he uses as a former to hammer bracelets into shape. Repeated heating and cooling gives his finished titanium pieces an instant patina, a mottled oxide coating that varies in colour from dried blood to slate and sea-green. Rigid bracelets and necklaces, their ingenious fastenings disguised within simple overall shapes, suddenly look like archaeological finds. Yet they are light–a ring feels almost weightless–and make a clatter when put down on the table, a reminder they are made of a hard new metal.
Titanium is an element in transit. It is neither so long known and so established in its various patterns of use that there has grown up around it a reactionary culture of limited expectation, nor is it so novel, scarce or otherwise esoteric that only specialists in laboratories and engineering workshops have any idea what to do with it. Though its ore was discovered in 1791, pure titanium metal was not obtained until 1910 and not made in commercial quantities until the 1950s, its potential as a strong, lightweight and corrosion-resistant metal having been demonstrated during the Second World War.
Titanium was already part of our lives–the metal used in replacement hip joints and bicycles, aeroplanes and cars, its white oxide ubiquitous in household white paint–when the Canadian architect Frank Gehry began work on the design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Gehry explored the possibilities of the commission in his usual fashion, by making tiny models from wood and twists of paper in order to gain a quick impression of the sculptural surfaces he might use for the waterside building. Bilbao prospered during the nineteenth century through shipbuilding and steelmaking thanks to the iron ore in the surrounding Basque country, so the port city has a folk memory of huge ships blocking the vistas along its streets with walls of metal. Wishing to recapture that spirit of the place, Gehry envisioned the swooping walls of the Guggenheim covered in steel panels.
Gehry’s assistants worked up his scheme using design software that had been developed for use in the aerospace industry. This computer power allowed them to reconcile the whipped-cream shapes of the building’s exterior with practicalities such as the cost of the materials and the need for a sound structure. As this work progressed, somebody in the office noticed something unprecedented happening on the world’s metal markets. The price
of titanium dipped. Suddenly, it might be less expensive to clad the building in the exotic new metal than in conventional stainless steel. Gehry’s work has always been notable for his fondness for unusual materials, and he had long admired the ‘soft, buttery look’ of titanium. He seized his opportunity. The completed museum, opened to rapturous acclaim in 1997, is covered in 33,000 half-millimetre-thick titanium panels–enough to clad a good-sized battleship–each one individually cut to follow the curved frame of the building. The polished surface has a tawny glow compared with the clinical coldness of steel. When steel reflects the sky it picks up its blues and greys, but titanium seems to find the warmth of the sun. The Bilbao Guggenheim has been likened to Chartres Cathedral, and certainly stands comparison with the Sydney Opera House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s original Guggenheim Museum in New York, its obvious twentieth-century precursors. It has received over ten million visitors, more than delivering the boost to the regional economy that was hoped for, and jolting provincial mayors around the world into similar efforts. The building may yet prove to be Gehry’s masterpiece.
Periodic Tales Page 26
