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We had established an itinerary halfway up the coast in time and space, between Lunigiana and the Apuan Alps, from Fosdinovo to Castelnuovo Magra, then Ortonovo, Nicola and finally Colonnata: from Dante to Michelangelo to summarize the art, from the Guelphs of the bishop of Luni to the enemies Malaspina, to evoke the struggles of a Middle Ages which left here famous monuments.
Coming out of the Middle Ages, then, we wanted to see the very crowded Crucifixion by Pieter Bruegel the Younger in Santa Maria Maddalena di Castelnuovo (where is there a Calvary with four crosses? I knew of the four woods of which the sacred Cross is made: palm, cedar, cypress , olive tree, according to the Fathers of the Church and according to The last school of Christian subtlety, made in the Calvary by Giesà in the cathedra of the Cross, 1651, by Giovanni Gregorio di Gesù Maria, but I did not imagine that the four woods had become four crosses); however – according to the style of the times – it is, restored and well displayed, from 16 June in the magnificent Amedeo Lia Museum in La Spezia.
Punished for wanting to seek art in its place (who knows where the Madonna del Parto in Monterchi will end up?), however we were rewarded with a magnificent tombstone, removed from the floor of the church and relocated on the entrance wall with this inscription (which I summarize): «This face, which the trampling offended, intact to its glory the family placed». Here: for centuries the earthly transit as proof, according to the verse of Isaiah: «Et Dominus voluit conterere eum infirmitate» (LIII, 10: «And God wanted to trample him underfoot in suffering»), had fulfillment in the «contere vultum» inflicted on the tombstones in the floors of churches, so that the religious and faithful passing daily over that face smoothed it out, until it was unrecognizable, until the features were erased. And here a family rebels and wants that face back for itself: Max Picard should have passed through here who already in 1921 had written that admirable essay which is The Last Man, the disappearance of the human form from contemporary society, replaced by piles of stones that box it and electric wires that direct it. We come out comforted.
But a much more arduous ordeal awaits us on the way between the statuary marble quarries towards Colonnata: here Michelangelo came to choose his blocks that were without vein or defect, starting with the block for the Vatican Pietà: «It was agreed with mastro Michelangelo statuario Florentine, that the said master must make a marble Pietà at his own expense, that is a Virgin Mary dressed, with Christ dead in her arms, as big as vno homo iusto is» (contract dated 27 August 1498). Michelangelo went to Carrara and took up lodgings with the “excavator” «Francesco who was di Giovannandrea de Pelliccia da Bargana», who worked in the Polvaccio quarry (later called Michelangelo’s). Then he returned in 1503, for the statues of the apostles (San Matteo, now in the Galleria dell’Accademia) and then above all for the immense blocks that were to serve for the funeral monument of Julius II Della Rovere. In December 1505 Michelangelo wrote: «Let it be known and manifest to any person who will read this writing, as I Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti, Florentine sculptor, at the place and acottimo today this tenth day of December in one thousand five hundred five, to Guido d’Antonio di Biagio and Matteo di Cucarello da Carrara sixty cartloads of marble in the Charrara style; that is two thousand five hundred pounds a cartload.’
They are huge blocks and dimensions (800 kilos per cartload), which testify how close Michelangelo was to that solid material since childhood, as Vasari writes in the Life of the great Florentine: «just as I also pulled the shoes and shoes from my nurse’s milk The mallet with which I make the shapes».