Description of paintings in Seravezza - Seravezza 7 - EN

Cave di Marmo, 1960 oil on canvas, height 60 centimeters, width 78 centimeters.

The canvas depicts a marble quarry in the Apuan Alps. The Apuan Alps are a mountain range located in the northwest of Tuscany from which white statuary marble has been extracted for hundreds of years, one of the most prized for the creation of sculptures. The open-air quarry that Catarsini portrays in this painting depicts some moments of the dangerous work that skilled workers must do to find the best vein to extract. The mountain wall takes up the entire painting, it is the protagonist, the men who work it are small, almost ants trying to conquer it. In the foreground a man with a blue shirt is bent over a tool and is under a system of pulleys. In the background, two even smaller figures climb the steep mountain wall, on a sort of barely visible path: they are the so-called tecchiatori who do one of the most dangerous jobs in the quarries, monitoring the front of the quarry and eliminating the unsafe rocks, often tied to ropes to reach the most inaccessible points.

The colors used are white and green, but not bright and even the white has greenish veins. In this strong painting Catarsini has summarized the entire history of quarry work with quick, immediate and powerful strokes.

The painting is signed and dated lower left.