Natural Magic

Such semblances emerge from their long concealment when certain stones are split open and polished, presenting the willing mind with immortal small-scale models of living beings and inanimate things. Admittedly such marvels are the result of mere chance, such resemblances only approximate and dubious, occasionally farfetched or even arbitrary. But once perceived they soon become tyrannical and deliver more than they promised. The observer is always finding fresh details to round out the supposed analogy. Such images miniaturize, for their benefit alone, every object in the world, providing them with stable duplicates which they may hold in the palm of their hand, carry about from place to place, or put in a glass case.
Moreover, such a duplicate is not a copy; it is not born of an artist’s talent or a forger’s skill. It has been there always: we only had to find our way into its presence. Ordinary rocks as well as various types of mineral specimens make up this prey of Pan. In China, poets and painters would see in a clef stone a mountain with its peaks and waterfalls, its caves and paths and chasms. Collectors ruined themselves to possess crystals in whose translucent depths they discerned mosses, grasses, and boughs laden with flowers or fruit. An agate may shadow forth a tree, several trees, groves, a forest, a whole landscape. A piece of marble can suggest a river flowing among hills; the clouds and lightning flashes of a storm, thunderbolts and the grandiose plumes of frost; a hero fighting a dragon; or a great sea full of fleeing galleys, like the scene a Roman saw reflected in the eyes of an Eastern queen already planning to betray him.

One kind frequently depicts a burning town, with its towers and steeples and campaniles crashing down. On the agate of Pyrrhus antiquity made out Apollo with his lyre, surrounded by the muses, each with her special attributes. In the seventeenth century Gaffarel, Richelieu’s librarian and the king’s chaplain, devoted a whole weighty volume to gamahés, healing talismans made of stones inscribed with natural astrological hieroglyphs. Princes and bankers of the same period collected unusual specimens sought out for them at great expense by the numerous agents of specialist merchants. Learned men, among them Aldrovandi and Kircher, divided up these marvels into families and types according to the images they managed to distinguish in them: Moors, bishops, lobsters, streams, faces, plants, dogs, fishes, tortoises, dragons, death’s heads, crucifixes – everything a mind bent on identification could fancy. The fact is that there is no creature or thing, no monster or monument, no happening or sight in nature, history, fable, or dream whose image the predisposed eye cannot read in the markings, patterns, and outlines found in stones. The more unusual, definite, and undeniable the image, the more the stone is prized. Stones that offer rare and remarkable likenesses are regarded as wonders, almost miracles. They should not exist, and yet they do, at once impossible and inescapable. At the same time, they are treasures, the result of thousands upon thousands of chances, the winning number in an infinite lottery. They owe nothing to patience, industry, or merit. They have no market rate or price. Their value is not commercial and cannot be calculated in any currency; it laughs both at the gold standard and at purchasing power. It is not convertible into labor or goods. It depends solely on the covetousness, pride, and competitiveness generated by the desire to possess or the pleasure of possessing them. Each stone, as unique and irreplaceable as a work of genius, is a valuable at once pointless and priceless, with which the laws of economics have nothing to do.

That being the case, they are frequently regarded as amulets and talismans. The owner of such a wonder, brought into being, discovered, and delivered into their hands through an inconceivable concatenation of chances, easily comes to believe that it could have come to them only through some special intervention of fate. They grow passionately attached to it, think of it as a guarantee of health and success. But we are not concerned here with the magical virtues superstition attributes to stones inscribed with images, nor even with the joyful gloating of their owners.
In some Eastern traditions insight may be obtained from the strange shape or pattern in a gnarled root, a rock, a veined or perforated stone. Such objects may resemble a mountain, a chasm, a cave. They reduce space, they condense time. They are the object of prolonged reverie, meditation, and self-hypnosis, a path to ecstasy and a means of communication with the Real World.

The sages contemplate them, venture into them, and are lost. Legend has it that they never return to the world of humankind: they have entered the realm of the Immortals, and become Immortal themselves.
I leave such fabulous emotions to their fate, concerning myself only with the present-day competition between the products of nature and the works of painters and sculptors, whether nature’s offerings appear to represent something or are pure sign. Artists have added to them or merely signed and framed them as they were, thus putting them in the same category as pictures. So they must have fund some correspondence or element in common between their own creations and these works executed by no one.

The juxtaposition should be revealing. At the very least it brings out some strange reversals. We have seen modern painters first give up trying to reproduce their models exactly, then abandon models altogether and eschew any kind of representation. And those markings on stones are considered most interesting which do not represent anything. Yet at the same time those rarer stones that do seem to depict something are coming back into favor. It is strange to think that nature, which can neither draw nor paint any likeness, sometimes creates the illusion of having done so, while art, which has always been successful at resemblances, renounces its traditional, almost inevitable and “natural” vocation and turns to the creation of such forms as nature itself abounds in – mute, unpremeditated, and without a model.
This inversion in the order of things seem simultaneously to reveal and to conceal a problem. To clarify the data of the problem, though I do not promise to find its solution, I shall try to define the ways in which nature sometimes gives us the impression of representing something. I should also like to explain the strange attraction of these manifestly illusory likenesses.

The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge, with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture, and history, not to mention what the imagination itself may if necessary invent or dream. So the imagination is never at a loss when it comes to making something rich and compelling out of a subject that might almost seem an absence of all life and significance.
The image which results from the combination of those shimmering colors […] induces in the beholder the same surprise as that produced by a sea louse, a water scorpion, an anteater, or any other creature left behind at some crossroads of evolution, almost a warning.

One day some bold being invents – or has invented in him – a form which may be valid at the time but which is soon set aside in favor of a simpler and more elegant solution. The brave discovery survives through inexplicable negligence on the part of those stern powers that usually eliminate the fantasies of a moment, even though that moment may last thousands of years. Such forms endure only to bear witness to life’s mistakes, to remind nature of its monsters, its botched jobs, its blind alleys.
The strange markings in an agate lead me suddenly into wild extrapolations, seeking, in the obscure workings taking place within a stone at the dawn of time, traces of similar abandonments. By their very strangeness the failures they perpetuate become for me so many speaking portents, or at least emblems. They somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes, a being in whom freedom and imagination, together with their necessary disappointments, will be more important than successes due to infallible and inevitable mechanics. They presage new powers, imperfect but creative.

Such aberrations exert a special fascination on humankind. They seem to be manifestations par excellence of what I have ventured to call natural fantasy. Perhaps their undeniable, unfailing, and yet mysterious attraction lies in the fact that, through some dim reversal, they assert the right a doomed nature has won to the gratitude of its latest, grudging heir.
Humankind has unknowingly inherited a capital made up of immemorial audacities, unsuccessful risks, and ruinous wagers, an endeavor which, though it long persisted in vain, was one day to foster in us a new, rebellious grace, combining hesitation, calculation, choice, patience, tenacity, and challenge. I can conceive of some divinity, some total intelligence that is panoramic in the widest sense of the word, capable of contemplating in one purview this infinity of vicissitudes and their inextricably complex interactions. Such hypothetical cosmic consciousness would not be surprised at the existence of a lasting and inalienable collusion between this series of fertile false starts and their ultimate beneficiary. It would seem to it inevitable that a secret affinity should allow the heir to recognize, among the daunting mass of nature’s ventures, those which, though they did not succeed, opened up, through their very failure, a glorious way ahead.

Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.
Obscure distillations generate juices, salivas, yeasts. Like mists or dews, brief yet patient jellies come forth momentarily and with difficulty from a substance lately imperturbable: they are evanescent pharmacies, doomed victims of the elements, about to melt or dry up, leaving behind only a savor or a stain.
It is the birth of all flesh irrigated by a liquid, like the white salve that swells the mistletoe berry; like the semisolid in the chrysalis, halfway between larva and insect, a blurred gelatin which can only quiver until there awakens in it a wish for a definite form and an individual function. Soon after comes the first domestication of minerals, the few ounces of limestone or silica needed by an undecided and threatened substance in order to build itself protection or support: on the outside, shells and carapaces, and on the inside, vertebrae that are immediately articulated, adapted, and finished down to the last detail. The minerals have changed their employ, been drawn from their torpor, been adapted to and secreted by life, and so afflicted with the curse of growth – only for a brief spell, it is true. The unstable gift of sentience is always moving from place to place. An obstinate alchemy, making use of immutable models, untiringly prepares for an ever-new flesh, another refuge or support. Every abandoned shelter, every porous structure combines to form, through the centuries and the centuries of centuries, a slow rain of sterile seeds. They settle down, one stratum upon another, into a mud composed almost entirely of themselves, a mud that hardens and becomes stone again. They are restored to the immutability they once renounced. Now, even though their shape may still occasionally be recognized in the cement where they are embedded, that shape is no more than a cipher, a sign denoting the transient passage of a species.

Unceasingly, the microscopic roses of diatoms, the minute lattices of radiolaria, the ringed cups of corals like tiny bony disks with countless thin spikes resembling circles of converging swords, the parallel channels of palms, the stars of sea urchins – all sow seeds in the depths of the rock: the seeds of symbols for a heraldry before the age of blazons.
Meanwhile, the tree of life goes on putting out branches. A multitude of new inscriptions is added to the writing in stones. Images of fishes swim among dendrites of manganese as though among clumps of moss. A sea lily sways on its stem in the heart of a piece of slate. A phantom shrimp can no longer feel the air with its broken antennae. The scrolls and laces of ferns are imprinted in coal. Ammonites of all sizes, from a lentil to a millwheel, flaunt their cosmic spirals everywhere. A fossil trunk, turned jasper and opal like a frozen fire, clothes itself in scarlet, purple, and violet. Dinosaurs’ bones change their petit-point tapestries into ivory, gleaming pink or blue like sugared almonds.

Every space is filled, every interstice occupied. Even metal has insinuated itself into the cells and channels from which life has long since disappeared. Compact and insensible matter has replaced the other kind in its last refuge, taking over its exact shapes, running in its finest channels, so that the first image is set down forever in the great album of the ages. The writer has disappeared, but each flourish – evidence of a different miracle – remains, an immortal signature.


Roger Caillois
translation by Laurel Saint Pierre, Antony Shugaar

Once again, it is Leonardo who tells of one of Botticelli’s experiments: By throwing a sponge impregnated with various colors against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it, which may appear like a landscape. It is true also, that a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots, according to the disposition of mind with which they are considered; such as heads of men, various animals, battles, rocky scenes, seas, clouds, woods, and the like.
Erasmus of Rotterdam tells the tale in one of his Colloquies of two pilgrims on their way home from Santiago de Compostela who discuss as they walk the wonders they had seen in the sanctuary, including a renowned jewel known as the “gem of the buffoon.” It had been given that odd name because in it “could be seen the semblance of a ridiculous individual, so perfectly limned that no artist could have hoped to equal it.” One of the pilgrims wonders whether that image was merely the product of overactive imaginations, “much as when we cut the root of a fern and find ourselves imagining it as an eagle. After all, what things do children fail to see in clouds? Fire-breathing dragons, flaming mountains, armies clashing.” His travel companion, still rapt with amazement at the rarity just admired, replies, “Do you not see how lavishly crafty nature plays at expressing colors and shapes in all things?”
In the fossil remains contained in the type of marble called “lumachella,” which form curious arabesques, the great Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi saw an enigmatic human face and crowns. Likewise, in the structure of the stone specimens in the Pratesi collection the observer can puzzle out a vast variety of images: butterflies, fish, dragonflies, and countless other things, according to each visitor’s own inclinations and visual imagination.


Jerusalem on the Arno

In studying the stones of these lands for their beauty, Pratesi soon realized that he was ideally repeating the actions of the grand dukes, retracing the footsteps of the Medici. In the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle, heavenly Jerusalem is depicted as a gleaming city, built of precious stones. Thus, for Christian architects, churches and chapels were meant to serve as a scale model of the New Jerusalem. In the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, and likewise in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, we read about fabulous works of architecture all made of precious stones. That fairytale comes true in the Chapel of the Princes, the Medici tomb in the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, which was conceived as a gigantic geode. The exterior of the building is made of pietra forte, the brownish, unassuming Tuscan sandstone, slightly enlivened in this case by white marble framework, but once inside, you are launched into a dimension of the supernatural. The visitor is overwhelmed by the magnificence and majesty of walls composed wholly of colorful semiprecious stones.

The chapel was enormously expensive, both because of the time it took to finish it and the sheer difficulty of procuring such a vast amount and variety of semiprecious stones: Ferdinand I undertook it as a global project, an act of imperial ambition that encompassed all of the known world. In fact, the stones were brought to Florence not only from all over Tuscany and Corsica, but from India and the Americas. In the Leghorn penal colony known as the Bagno dei Turchi, semiprecious stones were sawn into thin slabs, and then conveyed to the workshops of the Uffizi Galleries, ready to be finished by stonecutters. Sawing the stones was hard labor, fraught with grim hazards. The stone dust worked its way into the prisoners’ lungs, cutting short their already miserable lives amidst the hardships of confinement. Today, in contrast, electric saws made of tempered steel, their blades studded with industrial diamonds, have more or less eliminated what was once a serious problem. We therefore now see counters in kitchens, bathrooms, and cafés, lobby floors, and the walls of shops and boutiques that incorporate granite from Finland, India, and Labrador, or Portuguese marble, fine stones that would have astonished and captivated not only the Medici, but even the emperors of ancient Rome. Stones, in other words, that, until recently, would have entailed nearly inconceivable technical challenges to shape, finish, and install. Nowadays, tourists visit San Lorenzo primarily to see Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova, with no more than a passing glance at the Chapel of the Princes, considered either a mere curiosity or an ostentatiously lavish example of aristocratic spending. For the Medici, their chapel’s chief attraction consisted largely of the splendor of the semiprecious stones whose intense colors were exalted by gleaming surfaces – indeed those stones were the main focus of work in their manufactories. But as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, they also learned to prize a much more unassuming variety of stone with rather uniquely whimsical properties: pietra paesina.

In this humble, distinctly Tuscan stone, iron and manganese deposits within the limestone and clay create images of an unsettling realism that have led to a proliferation of visual associations. The structure of the stone often seems to repeat, on a small scale, the great geological catastrophes of the Earth, from earthquakes to tempests to apocalyptic destruction, as well as the pointy roofs and soaring steeples of city skylines or ports crowded with ships whose sails have been torn to shreds by raging winds. This exquisitely Tuscan lithic phenomenon is capable of evoking far-flung and deeply exotic landscapes: the modern-day observer can summon up the New York skyline, but also a Chinese metropolis, craggy valleys, and caves.

Painters used slabs of paesina stone as backgrounds upon which to paint stark and dramatic biblical stories, such as Sodom and Gomorrah, or Samson knocking down the Temple of the Philistines; or else as settings for daring Thebaids, with anchorites sheltering amidst menacing mountains. The stone’s lines guided the artists’ imagination as they inserted figures of hermits into an imagined tumult of nature. Above and beyond stones with chipped, harsh, irregular shapes, or edges as sharp as a knife, there is another limestone, the so-called calcare rigato, whose sinuously curving lines can be interpreted as gently rolling waves on an untroubled sea, and which was often used by artists to portray harbors and ports. Another case of mimicry is that of the verde d’Arno or Arno green, which was used on fine stone tabletops to depict the foliage of trees and plants. These were the few pietre tenere or soft stones accepted in the workshops of the Medici court.
Unsurprisingly, it was a Florentine monk of Santa Maria Novella, Agostino del Riccio, who wrote a treatise around the turn of the seventeenth century entitled Istoria delle pietre (The History of Stones.) Del Riccio was no man of letters, and was both rather naïve and overly verbose. Nonetheless, he managed to beautifully capture the spirit of the times and the passion of the Florentines – and the Medici – for these materials. He was familiar with the craftsmen and artists working in the sector – among them both Buontalenti and Jacopo Ligozzi – and was a regular presence in the court ateliers where the stonecutters produced their creations, including vases made of rock crystal, jasper, and lapis lazuli. He knew where to find semiprecious stone in Tuscany, had a perfect command of the marblecutter’s culture, and had mastered the poetic nomenclature of these materials.

The Florentine craft of cutting and composing with semiprecious stones spread to Naples, Kassel, and Madrid, but endured for centuries in its place of origin, flourishing again under the House of Lorraine and throughout the nineteenth century. The voracious tourist market has kept this refined technique alive, although it remains tied to old motifs such as flowers, fruit, animals, and geometric patterns.
Instead of seeking out new sources of inspiration, stonecutters stuck to those favored subjects, although they also came to imitate the landscapes of the Macchiaioli. Paradoxically enough, the loose brushstrokes of those artists were faithfully reproduced in harsh, unyielding stone. Though still stunning in terms of the technical skills required, stonecutting has seemed to become fossilized in formulaic sterility, dully retrograde, and pointlessly repetitive.


A Landscape of the Soul

Pratesi, however, seemed to blaze a new figurative path, prying open the stones of the Arno like the pages of an illustrated book to discover a wealth of unexpected imagery within. So-called frutticolosa breccia stone can hold its own in the face of the most renowned and beautiful Egyptian breccias, once beloved of Roman emperors. The Arno holds many surprises in store for us: from Max Ernst frottages, to Jackson Pollock drippings, to the texturologies of Jean Dubuffet. There are stones that, once cut, resemble moss or lichen or a carefully prepared anatomical slide of tissues from human organs, in a mimesis so successful that it’s impossible to look upon them without a shiver of surprise or reverent repulsion. Inorganic matter uses the same language as living tissue. Indeed, hundreds of these expressions of Mother Nature line the light-gray, neoclassically inflected cabinets of the Pratesi Foundation.
When you plant flowers in a flowerbed, even clashing color combinations miraculously manage to harmonize, whereas in a manmade textile they’d prove intolerable to the eye. Stones, even those with little in common, follow the same principles as flowers. To emphasize the beauty of some of the stones in his collection, Pratesi backs them with another type of stone that is more uniform in terms of grain and color, so that the slice of stone at the center magically becomes more precious, with more decorative intensity, its inherent structural designs emerging with newfound impact.
In the Foundation’s venue, these rectangular backings are framed and lined up like friezes on the cabinets. We should consider them as an incisive step toward the renewal of the stonecutter’s art.

Pratesi’s stones open our eyes to a great many previously unseen aspects of the natural world that surrounds us. A visit to this museum evokes the poetry of a Wunderkammer and awakens a sense of wonder at the arcane delights of creation. But the collection also proudly affirms its own roots, in a geographic area redolent with history, values, and natural beauty. It is the most complete collection of Tuscan stones from a very narrow area. Even a contemporary scholar thoroughly familiar with the nine thousand samples assembled by Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712-1783) will stumble upon some surprising discoveries in Pratesi’s collection. Such is Pratesi’s museum: both a landscape of the soul and a manifesto of the personality of its founder. A visit to this collection reveals not merely a fanfare of vivid colors emanating from the interior of the stones on display, but also the poetic aspect of certain subtle nuances that may at first go unnoticed. It serves as a guide to the wonders of nature in all its various aspects.


Detlef Heikamp
translation by Laurel Saint Pierre, Antony Shugaar