Bw Reads: The robot sculptors of Italy

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we're off to the Italian Alps, where machines are helping some well-known artists work on marble sculptures. You can find the whole story by Matthew Hart online here. Don't miss the incredible photographs and videos by Alecio Ferrari and Lyndon French.

If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here.

Sai Baba lay on his back in the cold sunlight on the mountain, his expression untroubled by the four-and-a-half-ton steel robot drilling at his head. The machine buzzed away in a mist of water and atomized stone. Its arm could move up and down and in and out. It could twist, tilt and spin its tool. Altogether it could work along nine axes—an impressive range of motion. Through the glass walls of the factory behind me, I saw other robots toiling, but this was the one Giacomo Massari had brought me up to look at.

Sai Baba was an Indian sage who died in 1918 and is still revered today. The followers who were paying Massari $600,000 to carve his likeness wanted something big. They were getting it. It had taken Massari's team a month to locate the 100-ton block of top-grade marble needed for the job and another month to define the block with diamond saws, coax it from the surrounding rock, and get it to the robot without breaking it. When finished, Massari said, the 15-ton statue would be the biggest robot-carved sculpture ever. It would take the machine four months.

"At that point it will be 95% done," Massari said. "The final 5% will be the hand-finishing.

"How long for that?"

He shrugged. "Three months?"

Massari at a Robotor carving studio in Carrera. Photographer: Alecio Ferrari for Bloomberg Businessweek

We stood there contemplating the robot. Back and forth and back and forth went the diamond-studded carving tool. It never paused. It never took a break. By contrast the hand-finishers would stop for lunch and bathroom breaks and insist on halting work altogether at the end of the day. Maybe even go home and sleep. Humans, what can you say.

We were high above Carrara, the world's biggest and most famous source of marble. Hundreds of quarries have worked these slopes in the Apuan Alps above the Tuscan coast since Roman times. Carvers prized the creamy marble of Carrara for its granular fineness, a quality that helped produce an illusion known as morbidezza—the softness of living flesh. Gods and heroes and rearing horses have poured from their chisels. Smirking cherubs by the zillion. When he was 22 years old, Michelangelo ransacked the hills in search of the perfect block—on the heights above us we could see the scar of the quarry where he found it. Two years later he produced the Pietà, the work that ignited the High Renaissance.

Many of the most famous images of Western art were made from the rock of this great metamorphic uplift. Rome itself, the Eternal City, was clothed in Carrara stone. It's as if the entire project of the West, its courts and capitols, its idols and its art, came streaming from these hills.

Today the great meme factory is short of carvers. Their numbers have fallen sharply. Studios run by the same families for generations have closed. Many artists embrace the robots, praising their speed and accuracy. The machines save money too, taking half the time to perform the laborious roughing-out stage for which sculptors would otherwise often hire specialist artisans. Despite some artists' enthusiasm, though, they tend to hide their robot use behind nondisclosure agreements. Carrara is knee-deep in NDAs, and I asked Massari why. "Artists," he said with a tender smile, as if we were talking about his kids. "They don't want to destroy the idea that they are still chiseling with a hammer."

As a segment of the marble business, sculpture is dwarfed by the industrial side, which slices slabs by the millions of tons each year. Robots help these companies mill countertops and shower stalls for markets around the world. But fine art sculpture is big business too, worth billions of dollars a year.

Sai Baba. Photographer: Alecio Ferrari for Bloomberg Businessweek

The first robot sculptor appeared in Carrara in 2005. Now there are about 30, and the total worldwide is around 100. Two men play outsize roles in this rapidly evolving business. One is Massari, the more evangelistic of the two. His corporate mothership, publicly traded Litix SpA, trumpets Massari's vision of the future on the first page of a slick marketing brochure. "We Don't Need Another Michelangelo: In Italy, It's Robots' Turn to Sculpt," proclaims the newspaper headline he reproduced from a New York Times piece on his company.

The other man is a bluff Midwesterner named Jim Durham. In Carrara, they'd known him for decades. He often bought stone there for his thriving fabrication business in America. Still, the Italians must not have grasped what truly drove him. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so surprised when he completed a yearslong stalk and, last Oct. 29, snapped up Franco Cervietti, the most respected carving atelier in Italy. Some in the Italian marble business were merely stunned; others, horrified. "An American!" a third-generation stone trader gasped when I asked him about it.

They should have seen Durham coming, because back at his $20 million stone fabrication plant in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, he was executing pieces for some of the world's top artists: names like Maya Lin and Martin Puryear. He was the biggest producer of fine art stone sculpture in America, and now, with his Franco Cervietti purchase, the world. To the Italians, this coup may have looked like Rome falling to the Goths—in would come the robots, and out would go the hallowed traditions of the last great hand-carving house in Italy. But that wasn't what Durham had in mind at all.

Keep reading: The Sculpting Robots Quietly Used by Big-Name Artists