Portrait sculpture in Carrara and Colorado Yule marble, hand-carved after a thirty-year career building the tools behind the world's biggest digital images.
For thirty years I built digital humans for film, which meant observing faces obsessively — how skin moves, how bone sits under it, what makes a face read as alive rather than just accurate. At some point that wasn't enough. I wanted to make something with my hands, something permanent, something with no undo button.
Marble does that. Every cut is final, so the work demands a different kind of attention than anything digital ever did.
The two aren't as separate as they might look. In visual effects, one of the hardest problems is getting a digital face to actually look alive — skin has to let light pass through it slightly, the way real skin does, or the whole illusion falls apart. Marble does something similar on its own, without anything simulated: it has a translucency that catches and holds light the way skin does. I didn't leave that obsession behind when I started carving. I just found a material that already does, physically, what I used to spend years trying to fake.
My family's roots are in Tuscany, in Versilia, where the same white marble has been pulled from the Apuan Alps for centuries — the stone Michelangelo worked. I didn't grow up carving it, but something in that lineage found its way to me anyway, later than I expected, after thirty years in a very different kind of craft.
I'm drawn to realism because I want the work to hold up to real scrutiny — not an idea of a face, but the face itself, caught at a specific, honest moment. That comes from working every scale of detail at once, from the overall likeness down to the smallest crease of skin. The human face and portraiture are where I've always naturally gravitated, for as long as I can remember, though the human form more broadly holds the same interest for me.
A selection of completed marble sculpture, spanning portraiture and figurative work.
Marco Di Lucca is a marble sculptor based in Longmont, Colorado. Born in Italy in 1973, he spent thirty years as a visual effects artist, working on digital humans and characters for companies including Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic, Apple and Nvidia.
In 2014, he trained in marble carving in Carrara and Pietrasanta and began carving alongside his VFX work, drawn to a medium that could hold what digital work couldn't: weight, permanence, and the direct evidence of the hand. After a decade working in both worlds, he left the digital industry in 2026 to carve full-time. His work centers on portraiture and the human face, carried out in Carrara and Colorado Yule marble with a realist, classically-rooted approach.
He is affiliated with the National Sculpture Society and the Society of Portrait Sculptors.
Technical artistry in visual effects and computer graphics, building the tools behind photoreal digital humans and characters.
Trained in classical marble carving and began sculpting, alongside his ongoing career in visual effects.
Left the digital industry to carve full-time. Studio based in Longmont, Colorado.
Every commission begins with the same measured process used on every piece in the studio — from first reference to final polish.
An initial conversation about the subject, scale, and intent behind the piece.
Photographic and, where possible, in-person measurement to build an accurate working reference.
A precise reference model is built, capturing the exact proportions that will guide the marble.
Roughing, refinement, and final polish — typically several months depending on scale and detail.
Portrait commissions are accepted on a limited basis given the time each piece requires. Inquiries begin with a conversation, not a quote — reach out to discuss scope, timeline, and investment.