‘New Carrara’: Lasa marble in the service of artistic ideas and economic interests during the long nineteenth century

Abstract

This article discusses Lasa marble, a bright, white and weather-resistant stone quarried in South Tyrol, which in the course of the nineteenth century came to be considered equal, and even superior, to Carrara marble. Because of its quality, Lasa marble has been and continues to be exported worldwide. The article considers the ‘new Carrara’ in light of three art-historical topics: its rediscovery against the background of the intertwining of the young disciplines of geology and art history in the nineteenth century; its use and semantic quality in the context of the new buildings along the Ringstrasse in Vienna; and finally, the various projects for the establishment of artists’ colonies at the quarries of Laas, the declared objectives of which were rooted between monastic harmony and tourism-oriented calculation.