"What is to be thrown on the screen now--in rapid succession for our
hour is brief--I call our Marble Quarry. Just think of it! quarried by
the same hard work which you all know, by which you earn your daily
bread; sculptured into forms of exceeding beauty by the same hard toil
of other hands. And behind all the toil there is the _soul of art_, ever
seeking expression through the human instrument of the practised hand
that quarries, then sculptures, then places, and builds! I shall give a
word or two of explanation in regard to time and locality; next month we
will take the subjects one by one."
There flashed upon the screen and in quick succession, although the men
protested and begged for an extension of exposures, the noble Pisan
group and Niccola Pisano's pulpit in the baptistery--the horses from the
Parthenon frieze--the Zeus group from the great altar at
Pergamos--Theseus and the Centaur--the Wrestlers--the Discus Thrower
and, last, the exquisite little church of Saint Mary of the Thorn,--the
Arno's jewel, the seafarers' own,--that looks out over the Pisan waters
to the Mediterranean.
It was a magnificent showing. No words from Father Honore were needed to
bring home to his audience the lesson of the Marble Quarry.
"I call the next series, which will be shown without explanation and
merely named, other members of the Brotherhood of Stone. We study them
separately later on in the summer."
The cathedrals of York, Amiens, Westminster, Cologne, Mayence, St.
Mark's--a noble array of man's handiwork, were thrown upon the screen.
The men showed their appreciation by thunderous applause.
The screen was again a blank; then it filled suddenly with the great
Upper Quarry in The Gore. The granite ledges sloped upward to meet the
blue of the sky. The great steel derricks and their crisscrossing cables
cast curiously foreshortened shadows on the gleaming white expanse. Here
and there a group of men showed dark against a ledge. In the centre, one
of the monster derricks held suspended in its chains a forty-ton block
of granite just lifted from its eternal bed. Beside it a workman showed
like a pigmy.
Some one proposed a three times three for the home quarries. The men
rose to their feet and the cheers were given with a will. The ringing
echo of the last had not died away when the quarry vanished, and in its
place stood the finished cathedral of A.--the work which the hands of
those present were to create. It was a reproduction of the architect's
water-color sketch.
The men still remained standing; they gave no outward expression to
their admiration; that, indeed, although evident in their faces, was
overshadowed by something like awe. _Their_ hands were to be the
instruments by which this great creation of the mind of man should
become a fact. Without those hands the architect's idea could not be
materialized; without the "idea" their daily work would fail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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