06. Representing stone
For centuries, anyone representing a stone has had to decide where chance ends and construction begins.
The problem Wagner faces in Schwyz is neither only Swiss nor only nineteenth-century.
At the end of the fifteenth century, in the Madonna delle cave, Andrea Mantegna places behind the Virgin a wall of rock from which stonecutters extract squared blocks. The mountain already appears as matter to be cut.
In the same years Leonardo draws strata, fractures, cleavage planes: rock observed as a structure, almost as an architecture without design.
Dürer paints a few stone quarries in watercolour. A few years later, in the Melencolia, the stone will have become a polyhedron.
In the eighteenth century Caspar Wolf climbs into the Schöllenen gorge and paints the rock as document and threat at once. In 1807 Caspar David Friedrich depicts a dolmen under snow: large boulders arranged by human hands, and already the boulder becomes monument and memory.
In 1853 John Ruskin works for a long time in front of a single block of gneiss in Scotland and draws it with the patience of a geologist. For him, drawing a stone means understanding how it is made.
In 1864 Gustave Courbet paints crumbling rocks: the stone laid on the canvas in thick layers, as if it too were matter.
In the 1890s, at Fontainebleau, Paul Cézanne looks at the boulders of the forest and breaks them down into juxtaposed planes of colour. The stone is no longer described: it is built on the canvas, face by face.
Far away, in 1610, the Chinese painter Wu Bin had already approached the question from another angle: a single Lingbi stone, drawn from ten different points of view. Ten views, and none sufficient on its own.
Painters and draughtsmen: each, in their own way, has had to decide what makes a stone a stone.
This is the question that the second part of this journey tries to ask the other way round: not how to represent a boulder, but how one might build it.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, 1853
Pen, brown ink, wash and gouache, 47.7 × 32.7 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Pen, brown ink, wash and gouache, 47.7 × 32.7 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Andrea Mantegna, Madonna delle cave, c. 1488–1490
Tempera on panel. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Tempera on panel. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Caspar David Friedrich, Hünengrab im Schnee, 1807
Oil on canvas. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden
Oil on canvas. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden
Paul Cézanne, Rocks in the Forest, 1890s
Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0)
Albrecht Dürer, Quarry
Watercolour. British Museum, London
Watercolour. British Museum, London
Gustave Courbet, Crumbling Rocks, 1864
Oil on canvas. Private collection
Oil on canvas. Private collection
Wu Bin, Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone, 1610, detail
Horizontal scroll, ink on paper
Horizontal scroll, ink on paper