Stone Carving, by Ginger Hanchey

Michelangelo statues leading up to the David at the Galleria dell'Accademia. Michelangelo (Italy) c. 1520-1523. Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

​Stone Carving
 
In fifteen years of teaching study abroad classes in Italy, I had never seen the David. I had been to the Uffizi several times for day trips, always at the mercy of the same guide who went into painful detail about each work, not caring that I had a baby or a toddler on my hip, who I would pass to Dan, who after a time would pass him back to me, and so on…as if we were in a game where we passed a really heavy fish back and forth trying not to let it get away, and trying to keep anyone from noticing the fish. 
 
Last year, I stayed in our home base of Viterbo with Covid while everyone else saw the David.  Even this year, just outside the entrance to the Galleria dell'Accademia and feeling the weight of this anticipated moment, a group of female students mustered up courage to tell me they were chased the day before into a café in Rome by a man who had unzipped his pants when he saw them.  Life carries shadows that make experiencing art, searching for it, seem futile, ridiculous even, secondary to the business of “real” life.  I talked with Dan about the necessary things we needed to do, how we could best help our students and report it to Title IX, as we made our way into the front room filled with bright paintings (reds, blues, greens), and then moved into a hallway with Michelangelo statues—each unfinished, but seen together, offering a lesson in sculpture processes.  There were so many, and they were huge, larger than life, and each in various stages of completion. 
 
As I grew to realize, the interesting thing to see was how each part of each statue was in a different stage of completion from every other part.  And even unfinished, how beautiful each statue was. 
 
The pieta statue with three figures, for instance, showed faces that to a novice might be from three different styles or artists.  In this statue, Mary is upright and looking toward Christ’s face, who has fallen backwards on her, his head leaning on her shoulder. By Mary’s side, a girl strains to help support him.  She does not look at Christ, but instead focuses somewhere ahead toward where she thinks they need to take him.  Christ’s face is smooth, but made of shapes that are still sharp—the nose a smooth straight line from the forehead, but with edges along the sides, like a sandcastle brick that hasn’t been rounded or smoothed away.  Mary’s face behind him is also made of shapes, but with additional tiny rice grains of brush strokes all around, like wind current patterns, or like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  These tiny marks are even more pronounced on the sidelined girl, whose face looks the way a face under a cloth might look—ill-formed, smothered—but with so many tiny strategic ruts.
 
It is interesting to think about whatever Michelangelo’s process must have been, not just how a face is made from stone, but also what things Michelangelo chooses must wait while he works on other things.  Christ’s face waiting unfinished while the women take shape.
 
Of course, the other thought in this room is how many works and faces Michelangelo started and did not complete, each one made to such great effect and on such a grand scale and still left unfinished.  None look ruined or worth abandoning.  In the museum, the crowd moves you, you move with the crowd, catching glimpses of these giant sculptures, until you see at the end the one with the name you know, the David, larger than even these prefatory statues, and perfected.  It waits at the end of these other attempts, centered and standing in light that is yellow and that exists around it alone, and all the people circle and hover and move around it like dust particles in a shaft of sun.
 
It is an experience of the mind, not just the eye.  A chance to think about a person who had a genius for seeing space where there was rock, for seeing exact shapes and measurements, who could fix these shapes in front of him, who could do this party trick again and again without mistake, who nevertheless worked in time like the rest of us, who lived in many moments of incompleteness, who left a trail of projects for any finished one—and that finished one even more a miracle for all the ones not completed.  You see the David, and in the same moment of seeing, you are thinking about Michelangelo, whose name on the plaques by each drafted sculpture is spelled Micheliangilio—the “i” a reminder of a story more personal and human than you have been able to pair with the idea of genius you have been given leading up to this day.  You stand facing a pedestal made not for the man above men, but made for the achievement of the man who lived on the ground with the rest of us—his genius and talent something to be dealt with like stone, a constant cutting away of time.
 
At the end of the tour, students collected in groups by the gift shop. We waited for everyone to finish their wanderings, to make what purchases they would make, and we began the walk in the sun back to the hotel, through streets that were narrow and that caused us to walk in small groups.  We carried our so-many conversations with us through Florence, but I don’t remember what they were.
 
Ginger Hanchey

Ginger Hanchey is the Director of Literature and Creative Writing at Baylor University and the Director of Core Curriculum in the College of Arts & Sciences. She has poems published in such journals as Nashville Review, Foundry, and Tar River Poetry.  Her chapbook, Letters of a Long Name, was published through Finishing Line Press.