The Cloak of Conscience and Tolerance is a sculpture by Anna Chromý carved from a single block of white marble excavated from the Michelangelo Quarry in Carrara, Italy, where Michelangelo sourced the marble for his iconic David. Anna Chromy's creation represents her largest work of art since Chromy turned to sculpture from surrealist oil paintings in 1992. As a result of her work on Cloak, Chromy was the first woman to be awarded the Premio Michelangelo, the annual award for sculpture, in 2008.
Dimensions
From the original block, the final sculpture of the Cloak weighs and features a hollow space in the centre large enough to accommodate two adults standing. The entrance is at the front where one fold of the cloak overlaps the other. The Cloak is high on its plinth. By comparison, David is and the height of an average adult male is .
History and versions
The Cloak of Conscience is the culmination of numerous depictions of a faceless figure hooded and shrouded in cloth. The first appeared in Chromy's painting 'To Be Or Not To Be', in 1980, which in turn had been inspired by the play Jedermann by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Don Giovanni by Mozart. In previous iterations, the Cloak has been given other names. In Salzburg, by the cathedral, it is Pietà, in Prague outside the opera house where Mozart first performed Don Giovanni, it is 'commendatore'; On the north German island of Sylt, where it sits outside the 13th century St. Severin church at Keitum, it is called the Coat of Conscience, as it is at The Royal Palace in Monaco. Here it is placed in the garden where Grace Kelly, as Princess Grace of Monaco, went to read in the afternoon. Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, has a smaller replica in his Forte dei Marmi home, other private owners of small Cloaks include Pope Benedict XVI, the Ferragamo family in Florence and the Ferrero family in Alba.
Following Anna Chromy's presentation of the "Heart of the World" sculpture to Pope John Paul II in 2002, in recognition for his role as protector of peace in the world, she also gave a small version of the Cloak in bronze. Shortly afterwards she was approached by The Abbot of the Holy Convent and Papal Basilica San Francesco in Assisi. He wanted to know if she could build the Cloak as a place of spirituality and meditation, following the teaching of St. Francis who considered one's own body or cloak to be a cell in which to find the deepest dimensions of the self. The first brochure, printed to assist creation of the Cloak, had a foreword from John Paul II: “Violence never again! War never again! Terrorism never again! In the name of God, may every religion bring upon earth Justice and Peace, Forgiveness and Life, LOVE!”. So begun, in 2005, the search for a block of marble large enough to accommodate people in prayer inside it. It was found on 24 December 2005 in the Michelangelo Quarry, Carrara.
Excavation and transportation
The Cloak of Conscience is carved from the same pure-white carrara marble favoured by Roman and Renaissance sculptors. The robust and aesthetic quality of this variety of marble results from the method by which it has been subjected to heat and pressure over millions of years beneath the Earth's surface. This has caused its metamorphism from limestone or dolomite to a material composed from an interlocking mosaic of calcium carbonate crystals. Typically marble obtains its colour and patterns from the presence of mineral impurities such as clay, silt, sand, iron oxides or chert, any of which might have been present in granular form inside the original limestone. The pure-white variety, found in the Michelangelo quarry at Carrara, results from a complete absence of such impurities in the limestone from which it originated.
At 250 tonnes, the original block of marble had its centre drilled out in the Michelangelo quarry to reduce its weight as far as possible for transportation down the steep winding road to the Michelangelo Studio, Carrara. This in itself was a feat of logistics and required careful planning and patience to ensure it reached the studio safely.
Style
The scale of Chromy's Cloak of Conscience, and the whiteness of the Carrara marble recalls the art of Bernini (1598–1680): flesh and cloth rendered as stone - the very opposite of its natural material qualities. This has also been referred to as the 'art of petrifaction', recalling Ovid's story of how the animism and 'diverse attitudes' of some marble sculptures can be such that they could be mistaken for real persons, which is a reverse operation in addressing the traditional ambiguity of sculpture.