Marble Saw in Carrara 1868

Nikolai Ge painted "Marble Saw in Carrara," location unknown and date unspecified, to depict both the sublimity of nature and human intervention. The Carrara region of Italy, a site of marble quarrying since Roman times, had grown into a nexus of global capitalism by the 19th century, with quarried stone being shipped worldwide. While Ge's artistic contemporaries typically focused on either the aesthetic beauty of the landscape or the social realities of working-class life, Ge seeks to reconcile these positions by documenting the labor of marble production within the broader setting of the natural environment. The visual juxtaposition of the rough-hewn natural landscape with the blocky, geometrically-constructed mill evokes a sense of the artist's perception of industrial development as an integral part of the landscape. Art historians look at this painting in terms of the economic conditions of the time, using census data, company records, and trade statistics to examine the complex entanglements of capitalism, labor, and nature.