ABSTRACT
The Pleasures of Limestone water is the finery of a caressing mother. There is reenacted the strong, resistant, coagulation of stone birth. A wet statue on a limestone fountain truly bathes. For purer limestones and marbles have an inner glow that disarms petrifaction of deathliness, though there is retained all the outwardness and objectivity of death. We sense a double petrifaction of this kind, the one in the making of the stone, the other in the making of the statue. Such quality, in combination with the comparative facility with which limestone can be cut, lends itself to the particular naturalism which we identify with Europe. Its origin, of course, and the scenes of its triumph, have been along the Mediterranean basin where marble and pure limestone abound, and where the geography is the limestone geography par excellence.
