When we think of marble, we think of it as a desirable commodity: of luxurious interior decoration, from deluxe kitchens to the most corporate of foyers – and of a roaring global market. Yet in the centuries prior to the enlightenment brought about by science and the birth of geology, marble captured the popular imagination as a mysterious, living structure with spiritual properties.
It is a way of thinking that’s alien from today’s knowledge, informed by the comfortable conclusions of empirical science: we know marble is a metamorphic rock created millions of years ago under extreme pressure and heat, deep below the Earth’s crust. In his new book, Divine Presence, creative director, author and one-time Wolfgang Tillmans muse Karl Kolbitz invites us to consider a pre-science mentality, when civilisations believed in the reality of miracles, dragons, astrology and the governance of an unknown but omnipresent divinity as a means of making sense of the world.
