Game of stones: paintings of marble and medieval mysticism

Today marble is often thought of as a luxury material, prized for kitchens and corporate foyers and traded on a global market. Before the rise of geology and empirical science, however, people imagined marble as a living, mysterious substance with spiritual properties, a view that made it a potent symbol in medieval and renaissance thought.

Karl Kolbitz’s Divine Presence examines how painters treated marble as something outside ordinary pictorial rules. In works such as Zanobi Strozzi’s Annunciation and Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of Saint Anthony of Padua, marble patterns defy perspective or suggest sky and earth at once.

Mantegna’s Lamentation and Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel offer other striking uses, while the painted versos of pictures were sometimes rendered as faux marble to raise humble supports into pseudo-precious objects.

marble, medieval mysticism, karl kolbitz, divine presence, zanobi strozzi, annunciation, piero, polyptych, mantegna, scrovegni chapel