Marmor lunensis and others
The contact with the Hellenistic civilization made to discover the beauty of marble to Romans; in fact until the third century BC the temples and domus were built with stones and covered with earthenware bricks and even the ornamenta, statues and bas-reliefs, were in terracotta.
Already in the 2nd century BC the marbles began to arrive in Rome from Greece but only at the time of Julius Caesar, after 59 BC, there was the real diffusion of marble for the coverings not only of the temples but also of the domus. On the Celio, the praefectus fabrum of Julius Caesar, Mamurra was the first who had the walls of his domus decorated with marble, arousing the admiration of many, when instead only a few years earlier in 78 BC. Marcus Lepidus had attracted criticism for having decorated the thresholds of his house with numidic marble, then known as ancient yellow.
The word marble derives from the Greek "marmaros" whose meaning is "shining stone" which well describes the main characteristic of this material which it must, the ability to capture the light giving it an aspect of exceptional shine to its main component, the calc-silicate.
The stone working begins already in the Neolithic with the creation of vases, small objects and sculptures, but the use of the cut stone begins with the Egyptians; it dates back to 2650 BC. the invention of to build with worked stone, by Imhotep the architect of the III dynasty who is also the first architect whose name is known.
The techniques that the architect developed for the working of hard stone, even before the introduction of iron, remained the same for centuries because lithic and non-metallic tools were actually used; the real problems related to the use of stone slabs were in the extraction and transport and the more large werw the blocks and the greater were the problems related to organization and logistics.
From the beginning the use of marble took place both in the construction and decoration of buildings and for decorative elements such as bas-reliefs and above all the creation of statues also of large dimensions. The buildings in which marble was used were first the temples and then the imperial palaces and the domus of the aristocracy as there were no constraints for the use of marble except its cost which limited its use only in the domus of the riches . According to Vitruvius and Pliny (Naturalis Historia XXXVI, 47), the use of covering the walls of the domus with marble dates back to the Mausolus Palace in Halicarnassus where the walls were covered with Proconnesian marble.
In Rome, the marble slabs were called crustae and very soon from the coating with simple marble slabs passed to the inlays. It was a trend that spread during the first century. A.D. so much so that Pliny in his Naturalis Historia, noted that it was an absolutely specialized process which was carried out with the use of iron tools but for which the use of Ethiopian sand was essential; In fact, the laboratories where it was sawn into marble slabs so thin they were very rare. During the empire this type of processing took the name of opus sectile.
After the conquest of Greece, precious marbles began to arrive in Rome; Marmor Parium, also called lychnite, marble used in the most ancient monuments of Greece and which according to Strabo was extracted from the quarries of the island of Paros in the Cyclades. It is an absolutely white crystalline limestone with siliceous geodes which made it very hard, so much so that the marble workers called it "hard Greek", but which gave to sculpted works a remarkable translucency. One of the most beautiful works made of Parian marble is certainly the Nike of Samothrace ...
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by M.L. ©ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (Ed 1.0 - 12/03/2020)
