The Marble Heart

Summary

Across the chasm of twenty-five centuries, a chisel’s ghost clinks: Raphael, modern and penniless, dozes in his drafty studio and plummets into 5th-century-Athens amber, reliving himself as Phidias the celebrity-carver, confidant of the barrel-borne Diogenes and hired lackey to Gorgias, Asia Minor’s Midas. In that twilight of marble dust he carves women so lissome that breath pirouettes through their stone lungs; the statues slip from their pedestals, mock their maker’s hunger for affection, and glide instead toward Gorgias’s silken coffers. Raphael snaps awake, the acrid odor of plaster still clinging to his coat, only to find history’s cruel geometry repeating: Marco—society’s diamond-edged coquette, icy, luminous, dubbed “the marble heart”—parades through his present, scattering hearts like cracked statuary. Wealth whisks her away; Raphael’s love, already brittle, fractures; ruin trails her perfume like a funereal veil; death finally plants his flag. The film is a diptych of eras, twin mirrors cracked by the same hammer of desire.

Synopsis

Modern sculptor Raphael dreams that in the days of Phydias, about 500 years before Christ, he lived as Phydias the sculptor, and was the friend of Diogenes and made some beautiful statues on commission for Georgias, the richest man in Asia. His female statues come to life, and disdaining his love, smile upon the wealthy man. Raphael awakens and in real life his of poor love swept aside by great wealth and how misery, ruin and death follows in the train of Marco, a beautiful and merciless coquette, termed "the marble heart" on account of her cold nature.