carving rock crystal

[Richard Emmans <r_emmans@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Joan and everybody,

Rennaissance artists tried to find the 'secret' of
carving hard stone like porphyry, granite, quarzite etc.
The common mistake was the Greek ideal. Egypt had a long
tradition of producing fabulous hard stone sculpture
(only recently they unearthed a black granite goddess
which has rested in the sea for more than two thousand
years and the figure was still immaculately polished (it
was in the Sunday Times weekend supplement a couple of
weeks ago).

Then eventually the Greek took over as the dominant
cultural force in the area. The Greeks, however, had
been quite experienced at woodcarving and adapted these
techniqes to stonecarving. As the Greek islands have
mostly marble quarries rather than hard stone this did
not pose that much of a problem. If you look at
classically ordered buildings you can easily identify
the references to wooden ideals.

The difference in technique is that of cutting with
chisels rather than grinding with abrasives. Over the
centuries this knowledge (probably alongside with the
determination to spend the neccessary time and workforce
on abbrassives) was lost and stoneshaping was done
exclusively with chisels. This is fine with softer
stones, but until the invention of carbide tipped steel
tools this was hopeless for cutting granite.

People either accepted the fact that you couldn't shape
granite or wondered and fantasized about mystical
abilities of the ancient Egyptians. (One of my teachers
during the apprenticeship was a hobby-Egyptologist, and
he was researching how massive columns weighing over
twenty tons had been transported from quarry to building
site; one of the suggested answers was, that the priests
sat on them and levitated the whole thing across the
desert very much like our witches used their
broomsticks).

Anyway it wasn't a stone carver but a jeweller in the
rennaissance who found a possible way out of that
dilemma. I'm sorry, but I forgott his name, but he made
an oval porphyry bowl from an antique column base, it's
quite prominent and features in most books on the
history of stone carving.

As the rennaissance ideal called for the allround genius
type everybody tried to dabble in fields outside of thir
trade. This jeweller then had the idea of applying his
craft to larger objects, believing (rightly) that if you
can shape small hard stones using abrasives then you
could do the same with big hard stones. Everybody
greeted this newfound knowledge but soon gave up trying
to do it themselves: it was simply too timeconsuming to
do so.

Only with the invention of power drills, carbide- and
diamond tipped tools and industrialized working
conditions did it pay to use granite, a field in which
the USA did a lot of field research and soon it became a
matter of prestige to work in hard stones to that
degree, that during my apprenticeship granite was looked
upon as probably the only stone worth carving and there
was no question about it, that granite is, and has
allways been, a carving stone.

I hope this quick sketch of historical narrative is of
help to you

Richard