In 2023 my sculptures were exhibited at the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Oak Brook, Illnois. In connection with the exhibit, I presented a slide lecture about the fantastic marble sculptures of Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, Italy, and our work to restore and preserve them.
The PBS television program Eye On The Arts aired this segment on the art of Walter S Arnold in May, 2022.
During my third (and final, but that’s another tale) year of high school, we studied Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As a way to evade the final assignment (not wanting to be bored by doing a serious, scholarly research paper with citations and footnotes) I hatched a creative alternative. Creating an additional character for the pilgrimage, a “Stoon Kerver”, I wrote his tale in (my attempt at) Middle English, executed in calligraphy on an onion skin scroll.
While pointing out that I hadn’t fulfilled the actual assignment, and that the meter was a bit off, the teacher felt the paper had great sense of Chaucer’s style and it earned an A+. However, I feel that that my verse had a serious error. It lacked a key element of Chaucer: irony. His work was satirical, and his characters were flawed. Mine, instead, was idealized. Then again, this was a 16-year old’s fantasy. As such I suppose it could be considered an early example of fan fiction.
Here is the translation in modern English:
The Carver of Stone
With us came along a carver of marble,
One of the finest masons in the land,
A master of the guild, though not too old;
His left wrist immense, his right not small,
His arms quite powerful, his great palms dry and coarse,
As was his face from life outdoors.
Upon his back a leather sack contained his tools,
Chisels and hammers, being of excellent steel,
Given him for work by a grateful patron;
A cap of beaver fur upon his head was matched
By a mantle, greyed from marble dust.
A gay fellow, he played gentle tunes upon his flute,
Bouncing along, his feet in brushed suede boots;
Around his neck a Saint Sebastian medal hung,
Of gold adorned with Amber, and a single gem.
He was not lacking in faith, although he went not to worship Becket;
He went instead to study the sculpture of Canterbury.
His work was worthy of his price, and he was not near poverty;
A more honest master could scarce be found in his guild.
© Walter S Arnold / stonecarver.com
For their Oct. 27 segment on gargoyles, CBS Sunday Morning and Faith Salie came to Walter S. Arnold’s studio to learn about gargoyles.
Walter S. Arnold first launched his website in the late summer of 1994, the very first sculptor with a personal website. At that time there were only a total of about 3,000 to 4,000 websites in what was called “the world wide web” or “the information superhighway”. A year later there were 19,000, Now some estimates say there are over 1.6 billion websites, with 15,000 new ones launched each day.
Initially writing the site in notepad and figuring out HTML coding by looking at the source code of other web pages, he also learned how to make graphic images that would load quickly in the days of 9600 and 14.4k modems. To give you an idea, back then even if you had a really great 14.4 connection, a single one-megabyte image would take 70 to 90 seconds to load, so image optimization was critical.
The site first got listed in Yahoo that fall; the listing required sending an e-mail to a couple of college students who were creating their web index in their Stanford dorm room during their spare time. They didn’t even register the yahoo.com domain name until January of 1995. Since the concept of online search engines was still being figured out, web directories, like telephone books, were published and available in bookstores to help people navigate the web. Walter’s site appeared in a number of them.
As a pioneering artist who understood web graphics, Walter was asked to write a number of articles for computer graphics magazines in the mid 90’s, explaining how to create images for websites. In 1996 he was tapped as technical editor for a book titled “Looking Good Online, The Ultimate Resource for Creating Effective Web Designs”, written by Steve Bain.
It all makes for an interesting balance, cutting edge computer design and carving stone with 100 year old chisels and ageless techniques.
I carve sculpture in marble and limestone, using traditional tools and techniques which I learned as an apprentice in Italy and as a journeyman carver on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. This site is filled with examples of the work I created with these skills, including my gargoyles and stone fireplaces.
Stone carving tools have not changed significantly since the technique of forging steel was developed. The pneumatic hammer was introduced between 1885 and 1890 (powered by huge steam driven air compressors), and has pretty much replaced the wooden mallet and iron hammer. Carbide tipped tools began appearing in the middle of the 20th century. Many limestone carvers still prefer the old hand forged chisels, and keep a wooden mallet close at hand. The basic concepts of carved stone work haven’t changed much in thousands of years, even as the tools have slowly evolved.
The three basic types of chisels remain the same: a point for roughing out the stone, tooth chisels (also called claw tools) for shaping and modeling the forms, and flat chisels for the finished surfaces and details. Within each class there are endless variations; for example, gouges, bull-noses and miter tools are all variations on the flat chisel.
Measuring and copying of designs is done in a variety of ways, depending on the requirements of the job. Architectural moldings can be cut using templets (now cut from plastic instead of the traditional zinc), which are traced on the stone. Many carvings can be done by eye, copying a drawing or rough clay or plaster model. For example, when carving my gargoyles, I will work by studying the block of stone, sketching on it with a pencil, and then developing the design from the block. When a precise copy of a model is required, accurate measuring techniques are employed. The “pointing machine”, an outgrowth of the Egyptian canons and the old measuring box of the Greeks, is a type of 3D pantograph.
Sets of calipers can also be used to measure a point using triangulation, and to enlarge and reduce or produce a mirror image of a model. These methods basically boil down to digitizing the surface of the model, and reproducing it as a sort of 3D polygonal wireframe in the rough block of stone. In some ways, this most ancient of arts isn’t that far from what is happening in 3D computer graphics. The stone is cut from the quarries in large blocks, typically weighing 20 tons. These blocks are transported to stone mills, where they are sawn to size. Large diamond tipped saws were first introduced in the 1890’s, and now typically use synthetic diamonds for their teeth. Slabs and tiles are cut with multi-bladed gang saws, which look a bit like giant cheese slicers and modern wire saws can cut complex shapes.
Tree Stump Tombstones were very popular in the United States in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. A style connected to the Victorian Rustic movement and the Arts and Crafts movement, they often symbolized sincerity, the end of life, or a life cut off. Many were made for members of Woodmen of the World, a fraternal benefit society founded in 1890 that paid for the carvings as an insurance death benefit. These are a wonderful and creative form of memorialization, and Walter S. Arnold has been fortunate to be able to continue this tradition and carve a number of trees.
Walter S. Arnold traveled to Italy at the age of 20, to apprentice in the traditional marble studios of Pietrasanta. The carvers who took him under their wings told him that, if he wanted to see what was possible in this medium, he had to visit the monumental cemetery of Staglieno, two hours north in the city of Genoa. Thus began his lifelong passion for this magical place, the largest open air sculpture museum in Europe and a collection unique in the world. Over the course of his career he has returned frequently, always learning from the thousands of masterpieces in this cemetery, but becoming increasingly concerned at the neglect, deterioration and loss he encountered. As a result, in 2010 he and his wife formed a non profit organization, American Friends of Italian Monumental Sculpture (AFIMS) to work with the city of Genoa and find American and international donors to help save these irreplaceable and inspirational works of art.
These efforts have, to date, led to the restoration of 15 major works of sculpture, and helped bring both worldwide and local attention to this nearly forgotten treasure on the outskirts of the city of Genoa. In recognition of this work, in April 2019 the City of Genoa presented Mr. Arnold with their highest award for those who help support and promote their ancient city, the Grifo d’Oro. Previous recipients of this prestigious award have included architect Renzo Piano, astrophysicist Margherita Hack, musician Peter Gabriel, Shimon Peres, Carla Del Ponte, Vanessa Regrave and Michail Gorbachov.
You can learn more about Staglieno Cemetery, and the work to save these magnificent sculptures, at afims.org
The city has shared Mr. Arnold’s acceptance speech, which he presented in Italian, on youtube:
