Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara

In 1911 Sargent went up into the marble quarries above Carrara, in Tuscany, and stayed. A friend remembered him sleeping for weeks in a hut so bare that his companions gave up and left after a few days. What he found there was a way of moving stone that had hardly changed since the Renaissance. Each block was lashed to a wooden sledge and let down the mountainside over wooden beams, held back by hemp ropes wound around posts. Records from Michelangelo's time already describe it, and this lizzatura, as the Italians call it, went on into the 1960s. Sargent made many quick studies of the men on the spot and pulled them together into this canvas. The ropes cut diagonally across it, and the tiny figures at their far end, high on the slope, give the scale of the drop. The Metropolitan Museum bought the painting in 1917.