Pietra Paesina’s Ruined Façades

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble Print – Dirk Wiersma

Pietra Paesina, (also ‘landscape stone’, ‘ruin marble’) known for its mimicry of landscape miniatures, has been collected and embellished at least since classical times and more popularly during the Italian Renaissance. The patterns of fractured light and dark within these rocks gives the impression of ruined cubist cityscapes, disjointed mountainous terrains with foliage and vividly etched tautozonal landscapes near the moment of sunset. Paesina often contain the remnants planktonic organisms and tiny fossils. Chondrites and Coccoliths form small armies in battlements to defend their limestone castles. There is one example of a ruin marble at the London History Museum, who’s landscape depicts, appropriately, the grey polluted skyline of the Victorian industrial revolution.

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Natural History Museum London

There is just one problem with these stones and this is that they are not large enough. If only these marbles would have scaled in their formation to the size of the landscape itself, then in the geological façades of Earth they would appear, from afar, as landscapes within landscapes, mirages of ruins etched in outcrops – true Borgesian self-similar facsimiles; as Earth takes a snapshot of itself in rock.

Ruin MarbleEpisode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso – Museo Opificio delle Pietre Dure Florence

Related:
The Writing of Stones
The Wave – Earth Waveform Oscillations
Spreading Time Chromatographically – The Painted Hills of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument
Prehistoric Messages of the Widmanstätten Cursive

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