Someone once asked Michelangelo the secret of his genius in sculpting from marble detailed, life- like images. "Rather than thinking about carving a statue out of stone," he said, "I picture in my imagination the completed work, in all of its exquisite detail. I then project the picture from my mind into the stone, where it becomes entombed, imprisoned within the stone. My job as the artist is not to carve an image into the stone but to free it from the stone. And this I do with passion because I know the image is already there, alive and breathing.
