Marble is a metamorphic rock produced out of limestone. When limestone is subjected to great pressure for a long time (like if limestone is buried under lots of other rock or an ocean) it gets squashed into marble. Marble is far more lovely than limestone and tougher, and for that reason men and women like to make use of it for buildings.

But marble can also be rarer, and much more pricey. A great deal of marble is white, but marble is available in all diverse colours. In ancient Greece and Rome, men and women utilised marble (particularly white marble) to make statues, and they used colored marble in patterns to make tough floors that would last a lengthy time. Diverse colours of marble came from various parts with the Roman empire - the purple came from Egypt, for example - and so this was also a manner of showing off, of mentioning how effective Rome was, that the Senate could bring stone from all these far away places that had been ruled by Rome.

Sometimes people also utilized marble in thin sheets on the walls of fancy buildings like churches or palaces, to create a brick wall look fancier. When marble was as well expensive, men and women utilised plaster frescoes on their own walls that had been painted to look like marble.

The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean basin supplied access to colored stones: yellow marble (giallo antico) from Tunisia, purple and white marble (pavonazzetto) from Turkey, and red, green, and black marbles from Greece. Egypt was the richest source of color, providing red, gray, and black granite, basalts and sedimentary stones, as well as black volcanic glass (obsidian). Sardonyx was imported from as far as India.

The Romans were the first to make use of marble in slabs (opus sectile), as a wall application (sectilia). This is because it was the Romans who invented cement, which was needed to hold the marble tiles in location. Henceforth, marble laboriously cut out of a quarry went much farther that when being used in solid blocks. The metropolis of Rome was redone with marble, to become probably the most lovely city inside the identified world. Most visitors to museums are utilized to seeing Roman sculpture in white marble. Considering that the Renaissance, white marble has been a preferred materials for carving, and until lately ancient sculpture was often deliberately cleaned with dilute acid or the original painted decoration continues to be lost by means of natural processes. Surprisingly, however, the Romans were avid users of colored materials in sculpture.

The widespread utilization of marble started in the 1st century BCE in Rome, and by the time of Augustus, buildings were going up everywhere in marble. At that same moment, over fifty varieties were known and special receiving docks had been create across the Tiber for the importation from all over the Roman Empire.

Cosmati function Architectural decoration in mosaic and marble inlay discovered in Roman church interiors dates from the 12th towards the 14th c. The first name Cosmas was regularly provided in two from the households who practised the method, the style of the Cosmati which derives from a marble craftsman called "Cosmas" who presumably went around to Rome from Byzantium. The Cosmati work can be a sort of mosaic technique in which tiny triangles and squares of coloured stone (red porphyry, green serpentine, and white and other coloured marbles) and glass paste were arranged in patterns and combined with big, stone disks and strips to generate geometric styles. Doubtlessy, the decorative repertoire of cosmatesque pavements draws inspiration from varoius sources, yet their style seems to be primarily influenced by the Montecassino basilica's pavement. Certainly, the very first cosmatesque pavement was probably created in the final quarter from the 11th century, precisely among 1066 and 1071, when the Montecassino Abbott Desiderius invited marble workers from Costantinople to lay a brand new pavement within the abbet's basilica. Now the cosmatesque pavement is protected by a eighteenth-century floor, in a hollow space beneath the new abbey, rebuil after the damages suffered in the course of World War II.

The antique marble utilized inside the laying from the pavement usually were red and serpentine green porphyry too as white, giallo antico, and pavonazzetto marble, which was interchangebly employed one for the other so as to obtain tonal hues based on dark porphyry and light marble, layng the former in the centre of the composition. In this manner, the pattern could be stressed by the contrast among dark and light colours, so as to offer the surface a colourful and lively style.

This typical Italian method, well-known all through the planet, was revived in sixteenth-century in Rome, after which specially in Florence, exactly where mind-boggling examples are to be observed inside the Medici Tombs and Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Within the Metropolitan Museum of New York is the most renowned antique marble inlaid table, originally situated in the Farnese's Palace in Rome.The stone and marble work did not undergo many variations fron the traditional occasions to today, keeping most of the antique tradition in the artistic production and in the specialized craftsmenship.