An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Genevieve Warwick (Nominated Fellow, 2025)
Taming the Mountains: Mining and Early Modern Landscape Art
In spring1505, Michelangelo travelled out of Florence to the blanched and barren coastal mountains of Carrara, as the ancient source of Italy’s finest white marble. He would spend the next six months in the Apuan Alps, working closely with the quarriers, in pursuit of the most radiant stone for the tomb of Pope Julius II intended for St Peter’s. His letters from Carrara are chiefly filled with workaday descriptions of locating, cutting, and transporting marble, offering a window onto the technical logistics of early modern sculptural production at the rock face with this most obdurate of artistic materials. Though 1505 was Michelangelo’s most extended stay in Carrara, he also returned there for month-long intervals on successive occasions, in the name of the papal tomb as well as a host of other commissions. For marble defined Michelangelo’s sculpture, and thereafter the course of Renaissance sculptural production more broadly, in his image.
As a work-in-progress interdisciplinary seminar, I will focus on the changing material and cultural histories of early modern mining in order to pose new questions about Renaissance sculptural production. Over the course of the 15th century, Renaissance Europe witnessed a rapid expansion of industrialised mining, greatly accelerated in the New World after 1492. In a contextualising analysis, I ask: how to characterise the type of knowledge exchange that took place between miners and artists in their shared quest for mineral materials? What knowledge of mining and quarrying did Renaissance artists thus acquire, and thereby of a nascent geology? Taking Leonardo and Michelangelo as my guides into a history of Renaissance geological enquiry and mining, I endeavour to fathom the significance of Michelangelo’s quest to ‘tame the mountains’, in his words. I consider the ecological costs of the extensively-mined Renaissance landscape: massive deforestation, and contamination of the water table through the use of toxic amalgams we know as ‘acid rain’. Renaissance mining manuals extolled the manifold benefits of their industry, but also the environmental hazards, evidencing a broad-based knowledge of its ecological consequences. My purpose is to uncover what awareness Renaissance artists may have possessed of the larger ‘environmental landscape’ of their craft. Thus my paper tills the subsoil of Renaissance sculpture to uncover the prize, and the cost, of ‘taming mountains’.
