'Stated broadly, Italy is the place from which the marble statue comes. Its output of commercial gravestones trouble the British undertaker, who is forced to admit that he can do no better -- nor worse. It is a fact that in a land where mechanical carving is a national asset, carving sculptors are few and far between; it is a fact that most of the best mechanical carving that proves so useful to the British modelling sculptors is done in London by Italian craftsmen. It is a fact that a good many of the marble busts and statues in England owe their excellence to the efforts of the formatore. In Italy there is Michelangelo and the Carrara quarries; Michelangelo who placed modern carved sculpture on its highest pinnacle; and the quarry workshop which has degraded it to the depths. That is not the fault of the quarries; the fault, which has been so universally exploted by the modeller, is the modeller's own. He has no business to trifle with marble; his business is bronze. Marble is the material of the carver, and Adolfo Wildt of Milan wrote a charming little treatise, The Art of Marble, in which he strove to indicate what he regarded as the most glorious material of sculpture. Among all the subjects taught to students of sculpture, the most important is ommited, the art of carving marble, the most difficult of all the manual parts of sculpture. In his book Wildt allows that it is difficult, and that he attacks it with passion. Admitting the possesion of the requisite technical ability, he says the process of modelling a statue to perfection in clay and then consigning it to the marble pointer is wrong. If it is desired that the statue shall be born with all the essential characteristics and prerogatives of true sculpture, and for it to be possesed of all the potent emotional virtues, it is essential to transfer the conception of the mind to the very material in which it is destined to appear. "How can you suppose," he asks, that what was executed in dull grey clay can retain its effect when translated into so different and hard a material as marble? Does not all the effect depend on the relations of lights and cavities and reliefs by which by artist expressed form? Can you imagine that by manipulating the soft yielding material it is possible to achieve the incisive stroke which will give semblance of life to hard marble?"
He considers that all the labour of modelling for carved work is wasted, and the effects of light and shade are all changed, and with this change the initial vision vanishes. Further than this, the next step of giving the work in plaster to a pointing craftsmen is an outrage on the original conception. The reliefs become mechanical, brutal, transposed, for insipid glaring, white dead plaster has no relation to the hard, sonourous marble. When at last he takes his work, or what is supposed to be his work, into his own hands again for the finishing process, he finds that the principal values which were the strength of his original work have become involved.
"Moreover, having only superficial knowledge of marble, and but little practice in the working of it, he never succeeds in regaining the freshness, vitality, and vibration of his first effort." He complains also that if a sculptor does not possess a love of marble and entrusts his requirement to a merchant, he will get a merchant's choice and his work will suffer. This, he thinks, was not the way with the great carvers of old, who must have gone to the quarries and searched for what must have been their inspirations. Having found their material, he admits that a small model set up in some rigid material, "so as to establish the principal proportions, the attitude and essential lines of the figures, the placement and the balance of of the great masses," is allowable. Having achieved this, a workman may be employed to hack away the outer shell, and then it is for the sculptor to get to work directly and by simple triangualation and with no need of a pointer, to realize step by step the from objective, by the development of lines and well - balanced mass - structure to make the perfect figure spring forth nascent from the matrix."
Much lamenting has been tossed around in regards to 'academia' neutering classical art. Although the technical training in the stonecarving workshops of the formatore and pointer were unmatched by any university setting, these workshops also did their fair share of damage as well. A promising artist could spend years coming 'up thru the ranks' of a stone pointing workshop. Many an artists with imagination would not carve egg and dart mouldings for years on end just to reach a rank of journeymen and the right to carve grotesques. The inevitable result was a divorce of sorts between technical acumen and artistic yearning; although for a very exciting moment there were some truly exciting works being done by some restless and talented souls under the banner of "en taille directe."'
