Michelangelo’s Carrara marble and Robots!

For centuries, the massive marble quarries above the Tuscan town of Carrara have yielded the raw material for the polished masterpieces of great Classical sculptors, not to mention the great Italian Masters like Michelangelo, Canova, and Bernini. Nowadays though, it seems that ABB 2, a 13-foot, zinc-alloy robotic arm, produced by the Italian company Robotor, based in Carrara, is living its moment of glory and even challenging the artistic supremacy of its human and more celebrated predecessors.

Robotor’s founders created ABB 2 Robot, by combining their artistic experience and knowledge in the field of classical sculpture with the latest technologies, such as 3D scans and robotics. Their robots are able to carve with pinpoint precision by extending a spinning wrist and diamond-coated finger toward a gleaming piece of white marble, the behest of famous artists the world over, who have begun contracting out the manual labor for their projects to robotic hands. Robotor’s owners believe that technology is essential to the preservation of Italy’s artistic primacy: “We don’t need another Michelangelo,” says one of the technicians of the company!

One thing that hasn’t changed in hundred of years is artists’ sensitivity about who gets credit for their work. In Florentine workshops, many artisans worked in obscurity, with a sculpture or painting created by many getting just the master’s signature. Now, it is Carrara’s robots who work anonymously.  Many of the artists that employ them want their identities to be kept secrets and want to maintain the mystique that they are still chiseling with a hammer, as one of the Robotor’s founders reveals.  And he also says that abandoning the traditional manual techniques that Carrara’s prosperity has long depended on is really the only way to allow Italian marble sculpture to survive and thrive again. During the town’s Renaissance boom years, Michelangelo roamed the surrounding quarries for weeks on end to find the perfect piece of marble for his St. Peter’s Pietà.  In the 18th c., Carrara’s marble was transformed into scores of neo-Classical statues, and dozen of ateliers opened up here. But thereafter, Carrara’s marble fell out of favor among contemporary artists and the translucent, gray-veined stone, became more the stuff of bathroom floors, kitchen counters, and funerary monuments. Many artists had dismissed marble as a medium because of the months, even years required to complete a single marble statue by hand.  And fewer young people in Carrara were up for the crushing work of chiseling stone, not to mention the dust-eating and all the other health risks that came with it.  Canova is said to have deformed his sternum by bending his chest on a hammer for hours at a time. At a warehouse down the mountain nearby Carrara, where technicians were testing a gigantic new robot, one of the Robotor’s founders created a reproduction of Canova’s brilliant “Psyche revived by Cupid’s kiss”, one of the greatest masterpieces of the neo-Classical sculpture.  Canova spent five years on the sculpture, whilst ABB 2 robot took only 270 hours.  Jeff Koons, Zaha Hadid, and Vanessa Beecroft are just three of the global superstars who’ve used Robotor’s machines, which, according to their creators, can achieve groundbreaking results only if they are built “with artistic sensitivity”!!