The Figures of Beauty (25 page)

Nobody notices, that is, until an artist as great as Michelangelo comes along. Because it’s not only that he is inspired by antiquity, it’s that he remembers something the world keeps forgetting.

Were you to stand in the Italian Sculpture Gallery in the Louvre, as the young Oliver Hughson did in the spring of 1968, and were you to circle slowly, around and around,
The Dying Captive
, and conclude that, in all your life, you had never seen a form more charged with beauty, you might decide that Michelangelo’s struggles were against forces far greater than practical difficulties. His real battle was with beauty itself. It was never easy to find. He had no choice but to put everything that sits at the heart of a stone carver’s soul into every stroke of his mallet.

T
HE KIND OF TECHNICAL VIRTUOSITY THAT
, by the nineteenth century, came to be embodied by an artist as efficient and as smoothly successful as the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova,
would probably have seemed little more than skilful cleverness to Michelangelo. Canova’s pieces were created by the transposition of a small clay maquette to a larger block of stone by studio assistants and by the use of a pointing system—a multiplication of the key exterior points of the model to the larger scale of the stone. This was mechanics, my mother always said, not magic. Oliver was never sure how, but he somehow knew exactly what she meant.

Even as a young man, even as someone who knew almost nothing about sculpture, Oliver Hughson was puzzled by the people who gathered around Canova’s
Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss
in the Italian Sculpture Gallery in the Louvre, and who then hurried past the unfinished Michelangelos. How was it possible for them to get things so wrong?

That’s what my mother always wants to know. “Why can’t people see what there is to see?” she asks. Often. Because when it comes to the ability to recognize the importance of great art, her opinion of most of mankind is this: they are barbarians. Specifically, so she likes to say, they are the barbarians who came south and stumbled on the village of Luni, an outpost of the Roman Empire—the empire they’d got it into their lice-ridden heads to conquer.

Luni was on the flats below what is now the region of Massa-Carrara. It was a dull, provincial place that did nothing but supply white stone for the empire’s capital.

Over time, the steady buildup of silt at the mouth of the Magra River, running not far to the north of the present-day city of Carrara, would turn the port of Luni into unhealthy and unprofitable marshlands. But the barbarians stumbled onto Luni long before that. And they were dazzled by it.

Dazzled by its one temple. And its one aqueduct. And its one bath.

The barbarians threw all their bearded, furious numbers at the handful of startled soldiers and workers stationed there.

There was the usual mayhem. Then, when it was over and the carrion birds were circling, the barbarians headed back north. They were very pleased with their great triumph. But they were idiots, actually. They thought they’d just sacked Rome.

W
HEN
P
IER
-G
IORGIO CALLED
C
LARA
and me into his office for his decision, he came directly to the point.

“This won’t do,” he said.

The brochure was to have been distributed throughout the area, left at train stations and at the reception desks of inns and hotels and restaurants popular with foreigners.

He held the text of “Michelangelo’s Mountains” at the edges of the pages, as if holding it more firmly would have demonstrated a commitment to its content that he was disinclined to make. “You seem to think our job is to send tourists to Rome,” he said.

Clara began to splutter a response, but he cut her off.

“No,” he said. “Rome does not need our assistance. We don’t need to send our tourists to the Vatican. We want them to come—” his pause made it clear that he felt he was stating the painfully obvious “—here. We want them to spend their money—” a pause of similar irony, only longer “—here.”

The tomb of Julius II, as Michelangelo envisioned it, was never completed. The blocks of Carrara stone that Michelangelo had quarried had come to Rome from Carrara by ship. Likely they’d been loaded somewhere in the vicinity of Forte dei Marmi and shipped to the Ripa Grande port on the Tiber, and then hauled by ox cart to Rome. But it was not long after they were amassed in the square of St. Peter’s, not far from Michelangelo’s
modest rooms, that it became apparent that the attention of Pope Julius had shifted. Julius pretended that this was only a small matter—merely a redirection of funds.

The truth was this: Michelangelo was heartbroken. He had to give up ambitions that are the hardest to surrender. He was being forced to abandon the artist he thought he was becoming. And this, of course, proved to be impossible.

During his eight months in the quarries, Michelangelo had studied the workers’ daily fight against gravity—for that is what their work amounted to. The conditions were harsh, the demands of quarry owners terrifying, the rewards to the workers paltry. All this he understood. It was like working for the pope.

Whether Julius came to believe that building his own lavish tomb was bound to be an ill omen or whether Michelangelo fell victim to the whisperings of his competitors isn’t clear today. It probably wasn’t clear then. Julius let it be known that the tomb would not proceed in the immediate future.

Michelangelo was furious. So furious, he let the pope know that he was furious—a dangerous impertinence that only an artist of the stature of Michelangelo could have dared. But Julius’s monumental self-importance made him oblivious to any reasons for an artist’s outrage, even when the artist happened to be one of the greatest in the world. Michelangelo was still just someone to be hired. Or not. When Julius changed his mind about his own tomb, he considered himself generous and thoughtful to be giving Michelangelo an alternative commission.

The new job wasn’t one that pleased Michelangelo in the least. He “made every effort to get out of it,” Condivi wrote. He thought of himself as a sculptor more than a painter. But even more importantly, it was impossible for him to abandon an idea that had been so consuming. He had the splendour of his design for the tomb in his imagination. It was hard to let such a vision go.

This was the point Clara and I made in the text for our brochure. We claimed Michelangelo never did abandon his vision, not entirely. He drew on his hopes for it. He drew on what he had lived and seen and what he dreamed of when, sore with the scratches of bramble of mountain paths and stiff with his long day’s work, he lay down on the hard bed provided to him by the holy sisters in their bleak convent in the hills.

When he was in Rome, when he was addressing the pope’s new commission, the quarries stayed inside him. The sawing. The hammering. The lifting. The hauling. Nothing was easy, not the quarrying of stone and not the creation of beauty. Always, what he thought would take weeks, took him months, took him years. It was all impossible.

There are still visitors to the Carrara region who struggle up paths, scale fallen screes, and edge across long-forgotten trails, searching for an
M
carved into an abandoned and overgrown rock face—as difficult as it is to imagine Michelangelo carving an initial into a rock to amuse either himself or posterity. There are people who hike the ridges that they think must have been Michelangelo’s cobbled roads, and who climb to the dark, surprisingly small caverns that they think must have been his quarries. Everywhere, there are rooms where he was said to have signed contracts for stone. There are buildings where he was said to have slept.

But the richest souvenir of Michelangelo’s eight months in the Carrara area may well have nothing to do with stone. This is what Clara and I proposed. It may be that tourists who want to know something of Michelangelo’s mountains can find what they are looking for well to the south of Carrara. It may be that they have to go to Rome.

Resigned finally to his new commission, Michelangelo drew on his efforts in the mountains for inspiration: on the energies
of his youth and on his memories of the quarry workers who had laboured beside him, on the gleam of their arms, on the breadth of their backs, on the fall of their thick hair on sunburned necks. He saw them working in the thin air and he saw them reclining on a ledge of rock eating bread and pork fat in the sunshine. He saw them turning away, arms stretched back into the tension of a rope. He saw them seated for their lunch, reaching out, a cup of wine in their broad hands. He saw them straining, pulling, reaching, pushing—resisting the unassailable force they confronted every day. These images seemed to tumble from him, these crouched and turning and twisted figures, these outreached hands, these roundly modelled, uplifted faces.

It took Michelangelo four years to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

G
RACE WAS A TEENAGER
when she jumped from the storage loft of the Cathcart Art School. She was, even then, fierce in her defence of women’s equality. “Did you know,” she had written in a prize-winning essay for her third form social studies essay, “that the question of votes for women is one which is commanding the attention of the whole civilized world; that during 1911 the press of this country gave more space to woman’s suffrage than to any other public question?” This, like her belief in art, was a passion that never left her.

Grace always remembered the afternoon when she first set eyes on the villa’s grounds. She often described it to friends. She was walking with Julian Morrow. They were making their way at a leisurely pace toward the pool. That was where their luncheon would be served.

Grace was adept at gauging the physical difficulty of anything she was about to do without alerting anyone to her caution. She
didn’t like anyone to know, but she needed to rally herself for these exertions. She had been in conversation with Julian Morrow as they had approached the stone steps leading up through his gardens to his pool. He was explaining to her that it was the terraces of the marble quarries that had inspired him to conceive of levels of flower beds and rockery divided by a single, long, central stair. “The inclines are constructed for the downward conveyance of the marble blocks from the quarry walls,” he said. “I’ve always greatly admired the look of them. They are called the
lizzatura
, and they are oddly beautiful in their dangerous steepness.” The last two words of this explanation caused Grace to glance ahead.

Within the constraints her accident had imposed on her, Grace moved with open, unapologetic vigour. She had the freckled, attentive beauty of a very pretty boy, and her slender athleticism made her condition seem less a handicap than a physical idiosyncrasy. It wasn’t a limp. It was just her energetic way of climbing the stone steps, between banks of rosemary and lavender.

That was when she first saw Julian Morrow’s pool. Her husband was a few steps behind.

“Oh my,” Grace said. She stopped at the gate and took in what was before her: the rectangle of green water, the stone figures, the tranquil cascade. One statue—a centrally positioned female nude—turned an urn of gently splashing water into the pool.

This was the bluest of blue skies, the greenest green of chestnut and cypress. There was thyme between the flagstones of the patio. The heat of the sun raised its fragrance. The long grasses buzzed. An afternoon bell, distant and tinny, sounded in the campanile of the walled town above them.

“Oh my.”

It was a fond memory. So Argue Barton would always think.
He would always remember how radiant his wife had been on that holiday.

Argue had not been enthusiastic about the trip at first. He had wondered aloud whether he would have the time for a honeymoon—until, as he was speaking, he looked up from the papers on his desk and encountered Grace’s level gaze. Of course there was going to be a honeymoon.

She had won him over. Oh, hadn’t she just. The Bartons’ tour had been a great success. And as a souvenir: something special, something grand, something as bold as the touch of his young bride in the dark bedrooms of European hotels.

Argue Barton commissioned an identical pool for their own residence in Cathcart. He couldn’t imagine how such an extravagant idea had come to him. But it had—a bolt of sheer inspiration, he liked to think.

His grounds, like Julian Morrow’s, were tucked in levels into the sheltered rise of a wooded hillside. The similarities of landscape, at least in summer, were striking. Cathcart’s winters were another matter.

Grace Barton and Julian Morrow worked together on the plans. Drawings were sent, by post, back and forth between Canada and Italy. Morrow had anticipated that this process would take a long time. Grace, he knew, would enjoy it too much to rush. But it took even longer than he had imagined.

Grace was at first preoccupied with the birth of her only child. Michael was born in May 1923. It had not been easy. Grace did not recover quickly. Argue was of the view that his wife didn’t completely recover, ever.

Julian Morrow had expected that the landscaping and the ornamental gardens of the Bartons’ private residence might lead to a few other small commissions in Cathcart. He had an instinct for these things. But, for once, his expectations were too
low. Long before work on the Bartons’ gardens and pool had begun, Argue Barton was recommending Morrow International for various important public works. And in Cathcart, Argue Barton’s recommendation went far. Morrow had underestimated the economic energy that would prevail in North America until almost the end of the decade.

The 1920s were boom years for institutional construction, and the marble industry had grown with the expansion of the world’s economy, just as it shrivelled, during hostilities, with its constriction. Demand for both raw and finished marble had all but evaporated in the years of the Great War. But the market steadily improved after 1918, and by the latter half of the 1920s, marble production in Carrara had reached 340,000 tons a year. Three-quarters of this was exported.

In 1926 a central meridian was planned for Cathcart’s downtown. It was not quite big enough to be called a park. It was, in fact, an accident—an unusually wide gap between the town’s two main streets that existed only because Cathcart’s first farmers’ market had been established there. This common would be grand, even on Cathcart’s small scale—an expression of respect for the public realm that, by the end of the century, would be entirely lost to private development. There would be large, shady trees. There would be planted flower beds. There would be park benches and pedestal drinking fountains. And beneath all this, under the paths over which Cathcart’s citizens passed, there would be public washrooms. Morrow International was awarded the contract for the marble panelling.

As well, there was the construction of Montrose United Church in 1927–28, an undertaking to which Argue Barton was a generous benefactor.

Then there was October 1929.

But newspapers survived. Quite well, actually. It seemed that
people were happy to pay to read about how bad things were.

Ten years after Grace and Argue Barton’s trip to Italy, the landscaping of their private residence was underway. It was overseen by the Italian artisan Morrow recommended for the job.

“Lino Cavatore is young,” Julian Morrow said in his letter of agreement to Argue Barton. But even as he wrote this sentence, sitting at his desk, looking from the window of his villa over his own gardens, and his pool, and the several empty pedestals that awaited the replacement of statuary—he realized the statement was not exactly true. Lino Cavatore had never been young. At least not in Morrow’s experience.

When he first met the boy, he had been struck with his seriousness. But that was not so surprising. The boy’s solemnity broke Morrow’s heart, but he took it to be the natural response of a child to the loss of his father and brothers, and to his sudden ascension to the head of the family. Lino Cavatore had a brother with withered legs and deformed feet. Lino had a mother to look after as well.

Who wouldn’t be serious about these new responsibilities? Who wouldn’t be grave and attentive when ushered into the office of the wealthy quarry owner to be told that he would not be returning to his job in the quarries? Who wouldn’t seem older than he was?

Morrow enjoyed being kindly. It was part of the pleasure he took in his own personality. And so, in a gentle voice, he said that he understood that the boy had talents that should be encouraged. The boy had looked stricken at this information, but Morrow told the boy not to worry. His mother would be looked after during the time Lino was in Carrara. Lino was going to be an apprentice in one of Morrow’s marble studios.

For purposes of his billeting, and his moral and religious upbringing, he would live at the orphanage in Carrara, on Via
Sacristi, run by the priests. He would learn the trade of carving stone under the best of Morrow’s artisans. This was how skills were passed down. It was a tradition, Morrow was always pleased to say, that reached back, from generation to generation, to the time of the great Michelangelo.

Lino Cavatore was small. But there was something in his face, something in his gait, something in the way he held himself against the world that was the posture and the attitude of an older, more hardened man.

“He is not yet twenty-two,” Morrow wrote to Argue Barton. “But he has worked as an artisan in one of my Carrara workshops since he was twelve. Lino is reliable. He is a hard worker. But more importantly, he has an eye. This may strike you as the minimum of requisites for your job. But believe me, my friend, it is not—particularly when it comes to the collaboration of landscape and sculpture and architectural form. Lino knows what is beautiful and what is not. That, you may be surprised to learn, is a rare talent. You will be pleased with his work, I assure you.”

Argue had expected that he would be.

He’d pictured himself strolling with his wife along the paths of stone figures. He’d imagined that they would sit on a stone bench in a shaft of sunshine in a grotto. He could see the pool. He could hear the gentle splashing of the fountain. He wanted a memento for Grace. He wanted something that would always remind them of how they were when they began their life together.

“Oh my,” Grace had said when she stepped onto the marble flagstones that surrounded Julian Morrow’s swimming pool.

Argue Barton wanted to give that happiness a physical form. But by the time Lino Cavatore’s work was underway, a husband’s gift to his wife had become something else entirely.

The peritonitis was the result of a ruptured appendix. An
operation would be risky. As such, it was a procedure that required her husband’s permission. But Argue Barton was in Halifax on business. The efforts to reach him had not succeeded in time.

T
HE FOUNDATION OF
G
RACE’S
youthful politics was her suspicion that women were, in many ways, superior to men. The world being what it was, this was a position she kept to herself. But it was an opinion held without arrogance. It was more like a kind of sadness in her own self-appraisal. As a teenager, she couldn’t help but observe that she belonged to a gender that, to a considerable extent, was attracted to fools. It’s not as if there was a shortage of evidence to support the view.

And they were fools. Worse, they were little fools. She wanted to best the boys who had pulled away the ladder from the art-supply loft of the Cathcart Art School. She was up there getting a new number-six sable brush. She would show them.

She moved from the supply cabinet at the back without hesitation. There was no slowing of her pace as she approached the edge. The foolish little boys must have seen her blue smock billow and her auburn hair stream behind when, with a confident smile, Grace stepped out into the air above their upturned faces.