MEDIEVAL ARTISTS DEPICTED MARBLE AS SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE, NEW BOOK ARGUES

Karl Kolbitz, a creative director and author, has published a new book titled Divine Presence that examines how marble appeared in medieval and Renaissance paintings. The book argues that artists of these periods depicted marble as a mysterious, living structure with spiritual properties rather than as the inert stone understood by modern science. Kolbitz contends that marble in these paintings often departs from the perspectival rules governing the rest of the composition, ranging from realistic depictions of porphyry patterns to abstract, brightly coloured swirls. The treatment of marble in art, Kolbitz suggests, reflects a pre-scientific worldview in which civilisations understood reality through miracles, dragons, astrology and divine governance.

Medieval and Renaissance iconography is built on extensive symbolic systems, such as pomegranates representing fertility or pelicans symbolising sacrifice. Marble's depiction within paintings stands apart from this established symbolic language, occupying what Kolbitz describes as a little-studied area of art history. In Greco-Roman and medieval science, divinity was understood to permeate all matter, including stone. The concept that stone could liquefy and solidify persisted in popular thought long after classical antiquity. Kolbitz traces marble's etymology from the Latin noun "marmor", which derives from the Greek verb "marmairein", meaning to glisten. Aristotle, according to Kolbitz, considered marble to be the solidification of the living planet's breath or vapours.

The book invites modern viewers to consider how pre-enlightenment societies understood the material world fundamentally differently from contemporary knowledge informed by empirical science and geology. Kolbitz's examination of marble in art offers insight into medieval and Renaissance spirituality and how artists visualised divine presence within physical matter. The work addresses how paintings from these periods captured a worldview alien to modern scientific understanding.