Marble
Marble is a metamorphic rock made out of limestone.
When limestone is subjected to tremendous pressure for a long time (like
if limestone is buried under a lot of other rock or an ocean) it gets
squashed into marble. Marble is more beautiful than limestone and tougher,
and so people like to use it for buildings.
But marble is also rarer, and more expensive. A lot of marble is
white, but marble can come in all different colors. In ancient Greece
and Rome, people used marble (especially white marble) to make statues,
and they used colored marble in patterns to make hard floors that would
last a long time. Different colors of marble came from different parts
of the Roman empire - the purple came from Egypt,
for instance - and so this was also a way of showing off, of pointing
out how powerful Rome was, that the Senate could bring stone from all
these far away places that were ruled by Rome.
Sometimes people also used marble in thin sheets on
the walls of fancy buildings like churches or palaces,
to make a brick wall look fancier. When marble
was too expensive, people used plaster frescoes
on their walls that were painted to look like marble.
Here's a video of someone carving a marble statue:
Main art page
To find out more about marble, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
DK Eyewitness Guides: Building, by Philip Wilkinson (2000).
Geology: A Golden Guide from St. Martin's Press, by Frank Rhodes (2001).
Ancient marble quarrying and trade (1986). A collection of papers by specialists, for specialists, about marble in ancient Greece and Rome.
Limestone
Travertine
Tufa
Basalt
Teachers' guides on art
Art-related gifts
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