Who remembers the original name of the Loos Bar in Vienna?

The name of the architect has long since pushed the "American Bar" out of memory.

Where would you find another room that would be so sober and make you so drunk, baptistery and gate of hell at the same time?

It is unbelievable what sensual qualities marble possesses and what images it can evoke in the mind.

Of course, only those who have knelt in front of the building on Michaelerplatz are allowed to enter the bar.

It is rightly regarded as the main work of the Viennese stonemason's son.

Of course, earlier people also made the stone shine, as this volume on its aesthetics from late antiquity to the present day shows: the white Parian marble, which was prized by the sculptors of antiquity, the blocks from Carrara, from which Michelangelo, Bernini and Canova peel their figures.

Still others have opened their veins to the red fabric from Sicily and the Belgian Rance.

But nobody, like Adolf Loos, created a work of art out of masses of grey-green Cipollino that elegantly reduced the dispute (which he himself had fueled) about ornament to the point of absurdity.

By discovering the equally sublime and casually rippling image source in the depths of the stone, Loos allowed building material and ornament, substance and accident to merge.

Ornament was neither abolished nor "repealed";

Clouds, shadows, inkblots

Loos' trick was based on a property of the material for which marble has been valued and coveted for thousands of years.

In addition to its color, it is above all the "grain" or veining of the metamorphic rock - geologically the result of the recrystallization of limestone.

Its imitations are as numerous as the uses of marble in architecture and sculpture: as "marbling", the artificial reproduction of the effects in other materials has made a never-ending career.

Only wood processed as a veneer has a comparable aesthetic effect.

Thanks to the cut, the grinding and the polishing, the surfaces of marble possess a peculiar visual ambiguity.

Their unstable position between image and structure, in other words between iconicity and aniconicity, creates a peculiar fascination.

Marble is one of those dreamy, fluid structures like clouds, shadows, inkblots, in which one sees figures appearing and dissolving in an instant.

The phenomenon has often been described: the image emerges and vanishes in the eye of the beholder.

The lines, stains and hatchings in the marble allow one to experience how image genesis in the imaginary sets off, so to speak.

Festive opulence

This explains why image-loving cultures hung or set marble discs framed on the wall like paintings (examples in the Roman pantheon as in the Palace of Versailles), while iconophobic cultures such as the Islamic found in marble a material that conveyed the power of Summoning images at the same time as seemed to banish.

Marble was thus able to become the material bridge on which the arts of the East and the West met again and again - visible in so many spoils that wandered back and forth between the churches of the Crusaders and the mosques of the Muslims in the Levant.

This volume supplements the material iconography that has been established for fifty years with a series of impressive individual studies and a sober but festive opulence.

By emphasizing the transcultural aesthetics of marble, he advances art history as a leading international humanities discipline.

"The Aesthetics of Marble from Late Antiquity to the Present".

Edited by Dario Gamboni, Gerhard Wolf and Jessica N. Richardson.

Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2021. 431 p., ill., hardcover, €58.