Before us stands a marble sculpture. We ask: how old is it? Were we to ask the same question of a fellow human, we would count the years since he or she was born. From what moment, then, should we count the birth of the statue? Was it born in the workshop, where a master sculptor and his apprentices would have laboured to grind and polish a rough-hewn block of stone so as to bring out a surface texture as soft and smooth as a baby’s skin? Or was it born amidst the anarchy and violence of the quarry site, when the block was forcibly hewn from the hillside, leaving it broken and scarred? Or should we date its birth to many million years before, in the gradual deposition of detritus from the microfauna of ancient seas, and the subsequent metamorphosis of the resulting sediment under pressure from the earth’s continental crust above, and heating from its magma chambers below? The very word ‘marble’ echoes to the shine and murmur of ocean, as if the material itself was sea-swell turned to stone. And if the sculpture has three births, then it must likewise partake of three lives, respectively geological, mineralogical, and monumental. Rather than following one another in sequence, these lives are concurrent. How, then, do they bear upon one another? ​