It is a relief to return to 'normal' blogging for this post and to showcase a really interesting bit of geology. After all, that's what I actually created this blog to do!
The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the
soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was
underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's
Gallery at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of
the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as
beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be. We saw
the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw amazing paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the first time for either of us,
sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing. The sketches were the highlight of the day for me.
One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezia in Italy, and this slice adorns the top of a very ornate (actually overly ornate to my Philistine eyes) table. The structure of the rock shows the effects of the heat and pressure that altered it from the limestone it once was; the black in it comes from organic marine material, and the gold and fawn colours come from oxidation of that same organic matter. As it was reformed, it was pulled like toffee - but it's probably best not to try to eat it. The heat, the pressure, the stretching, doing this to solid rock! To my eyes, though, it looks like a dessert you could get a spoon into. I was really pleased with how the photo came out; polished surfaces are so-and-so's to photograph; at the very basic level I use my phone camera at, it tries to focus *through* the reflective surface.
Comments
Post a Comment