Below an overhanging abacus a scroll volute in the shape of a wide lyre continued to the break at the right; between the horns of the lyre rises a large acanthus leaf with overhanging end and two flowered tendrils. The nature of the flower at the right, which curls in the same (left) direction as that at the left, indicates that the whole motive was redoubled beyond the break. The enrichment is separated from a smooth surface below by a set of mouldings similar to the abacus.

Although included with the ancient Roman fragments of the Tatham Collection, this pilastered carving cannot be considered antique. A larger, more elaborate example, dated most likely to the first century of the Empire, was found in the Tiber and is preserved in the Museo Nazionale Romano¹. There is what appears to be a nearly identical pilaster capital (the little flower at the left turns inwards) drawn without indication of locality by Giuliano da Sangallo in Folio 10 of the Codex Barberini² . It is an antique composition, however, as appears from the pilaster etched in the Villa Borghese by Piranesi³ and from the capitals preserved in the Arch of Augustus at Aosta⁴ ; Ronczewski has also collected and analysed a number of related antique prototypes for this capital, which are dated by him to the first century of the imperial period⁵ . They are all small pilaster capitals of a secondary decorative nature and include examples from the theatre at Ostia, Pompeii, and the Palatine (cp. also the provincial examples, at least two from a funerary monument, in Aquileia⁶ .

¹ P. Gusman, L'Art décoratif de Rome de la fin de la république au IV siècle, Paris, 1910, III, pl. XXI.
² Cod. Vat. Barb. Lat. 4424; Huelsen, Descrizione, p. 18.
³ De Rom. Mag., pl. XIII.
⁴ Ronczewski, Motive, fig. 101.
⁵ Anzeiger (Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts), 1934, cols. 31ff., esp. figs. 14 (Piranesi) - 18.
⁶ V. Scrinari, I Capitelli romani di Aquileia, Padua, 1952, i, nos. 10,a-c; and the more impressive pilaster capital, no. 8, which is related to those of the arches of Augustus at Aosta and Susa.

Rome; collected in Rome by Charles Heathcote Tatham for the architect Henry Holland during the 1790s. See Cornelius Vermeule, unpublished catalogue of the Antiquities at Sir John Soane's Museum, Introduction, transcription of Tatham letters, List 2, no. 23.

Tatham: Drawings, 1.