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Fragment from a relief panel: a beech tree and leaves
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Fragment from a relief panel: a beech tree and leaves
Luna marble
Height: 31cm
Width: 15cm
Width: 15cm
Museum number: M570
Vermeule catalogue number: Vermeule 164
On display: Museum South Passage
All spaces are in No. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields unless identified as in No. 12, Soane's first house.
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Curatorial note
The knotty, gnarled trunk, branches, and wind-blown leaves of a beech tree or large branch against a rough relief background.
Whatever the type of tree, the treatment in relief detail may be compared in a more than a general manner with the trees on which birds perch in the background of the lost (?) oval relief of Orpheus among the beasts, once in the Mattei collection1 and preserved in a superlative coloured drawing in the Royal Library at Windsor2 . The work suggests that in the fragment of a large Hellenistic-type relief with vine or olive tree, wall, and drapery, in the Antiquario of the Villa Adriana (Hadriana), no. 411.
1Reinach, RR, III, p. 303, no. 1.
2A. 47, Michaelis VIII, no. 8709.
Whatever the type of tree, the treatment in relief detail may be compared in a more than a general manner with the trees on which birds perch in the background of the lost (?) oval relief of Orpheus among the beasts, once in the Mattei collection1 and preserved in a superlative coloured drawing in the Royal Library at Windsor2 . The work suggests that in the fragment of a large Hellenistic-type relief with vine or olive tree, wall, and drapery, in the Antiquario of the Villa Adriana (Hadriana), no. 411.
1Reinach, RR, III, p. 303, no. 1.
2A. 47, Michaelis VIII, no. 8709.
Provenance
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 See Cornelius Vermeule, unpublished Catalogue of the Antiquities at Sir John Soane's Museum, Introduction, transcription of Tatham letters, List 2, no.42.
Literature
Tatham: Drawings, 1.
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