Michelangelo Buonarroti Illustration of Michelangelo’s sonnet on the sculptor and the marble

What the marble encloses

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), an Italian sculptor, painter and poet, begins one of his sonnets with a familiar problem from the workshop. A block of marble stands before the sculptor. Its weight and dimensions are given. What may one day be a head or a hand is still enclosed within material that the chisel must take away. Yet what guides the hand when it decides where the next blow should fall?

The difficulty of taking things away

The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.

– Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, 1817, p. 1.[1]

The striking word in the first stanza is the one for excess. From the outside the spectator sees a single stone. Only someone who has conceived the finished work can say which part is surplus. A single premature blow can just as easily remove a piece of the future figure. Between the sculptor’s idea and the statue stands a hand that can handle its tool and knows the moment at which to stop.

Why the poem leaves the workshop

In the next stanza the speaker turns to address a woman. In her, the good he hopes for and the harm he fears lie as close together as the possible figure and the excess stone did in the marble. The sculptor’s achievement makes the lover’s failure all the more painful. By the end he asks how he manages to draw only death from a heart in which he might also have found pity. The marble has acquired a second significance. Someone can perceive several possibilities in another person and still lack the skill to reach the one for which he longs.