Ben Franklin's Dewlap

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Greetings fellow lithopractors,

I turned up in a musuem of art last Friday night, in a
room with two white marble busts.  One, of a young woman,
by Edmonia Lewis; and another, of an elderly Ben Franklin
by Hiram Powers if I am not misrecollecting.  The Lewis
portrait extremely forceful in the depths of roundness of
the features.  The arch of the brow as it jumped high to
turn inward to the temple.  The orbs of the eyes almost
released from the bonds of their sockets.   But  what
etched so sharpley was the crispness of the cut of the
seperations, most notably the cleft invaginating between
closed lips.   The depth and narrowness of the fissure
brought startling clarity to the mounded piles of mouth
flesh but also a question of technology.  How she done it?
 To go so narrow and so deep and to such finish.

The Franklin bust was of softened feature,  A cast blur of
welcoming intimacy with a vest of powder crystal seeming
newly fallen.  But just as fresh snow damps visual sensors
to a readiness to drink sparlking draughts of  excision
and texture, the eyes having fallen upon the rough bark of
a snow laden bough, recessed under the salience of  Ben's
jaw crept about his neck the minutest and most finely
drawn folds of skin.  Of milmeters or less across the
furrow from side to side, of faultless dusty finish, free
of tool's trace or bruised whiting is Carrara so different
 from Vermont which requires rounds of sanding to remove a
file's sratch?  How did Powers finish out the whiting
scratches without dulling our disfuguring the claritiy of
the fold?  The tighness of the crack, narrowing to an
infinity of fraction would admit no paper I know.
Perhaps a rubbing stone, but I have had no such luck with
these as the engender marks of whiting themselves.   To be
honest to attempt such an infinity of detail would not
have occured to me had I not happened by the museum, on a
Friday night.

Bill