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FRAGMENT OF AN ARCHITRAVE
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FRAGMENT OF AN ARCHITRAVE
193-235 AD
Possibly Severan.
Possibly Severan.
Asiatic marble
Height: 36cm
Width: 31cm
Thickness: 5cm
Width: 31cm
Thickness: 5cm
Museum number: M865
Vermeule catalogue number: Vermeule 99
On display: Dome Area
All spaces are in No. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields unless identified as in No. 12, Soane's first house.
For tours https://www.soane.org/your-visit
Curatorial note
From top to bottom, the enriched courses of this small architrave consist of egg and dart, bead, enriched cyma reversa and bead and reel, separated by two courses of rough surface and with a further course of plain rough surface at the bottom.
An identical arrangement of enrichment was followed in the architrave of the entablature of the "door in the Baths of Titus" as drawn by Baldassare Peruzzi1 and Andreas Coner in the Codex Coner (SM Vol. 115)2 but the close stylistic parallel lies in the cutting of the fragments from the Severan reconstruction of the Rostrum, lying near their original setting in the Roman Forum. The same division of single into double part leaf enrichment indicates a school of carving common to both. While found on Roman buildings the architrave with enriched lower fascia is relatively rare3.
1 Uffizi Sketchbooks, fol. 632r; see also Heinrich Wurm, Baldassare Peruzzi, Architekturzeichnungen, Tübingen 1984, pl. 636 (not clearly visible).
2 Thomas Ashby, Sixteenth-century drawings attributed to Andreas Coner, PBSR, (Papers of the British School at Rome, London: Macmillan & Co., 1904), II, no. 91a.
3 Compare, on a larger scale, the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum, see L. Canina, Gli Edifizj di Roma antica, cogniti per alcune importanti reliquie descritti e dimostrati nell'intera loro architettura, 4 vols, Rome, 1848-51: II, pl. XXVIII.
An identical arrangement of enrichment was followed in the architrave of the entablature of the "door in the Baths of Titus" as drawn by Baldassare Peruzzi1 and Andreas Coner in the Codex Coner (SM Vol. 115)2 but the close stylistic parallel lies in the cutting of the fragments from the Severan reconstruction of the Rostrum, lying near their original setting in the Roman Forum. The same division of single into double part leaf enrichment indicates a school of carving common to both. While found on Roman buildings the architrave with enriched lower fascia is relatively rare3.
1 Uffizi Sketchbooks, fol. 632r; see also Heinrich Wurm, Baldassare Peruzzi, Architekturzeichnungen, Tübingen 1984, pl. 636 (not clearly visible).
2 Thomas Ashby, Sixteenth-century drawings attributed to Andreas Coner, PBSR, (Papers of the British School at Rome, London: Macmillan & Co., 1904), II, no. 91a.
3 Compare, on a larger scale, the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum, see L. Canina, Gli Edifizj di Roma antica, cogniti per alcune importanti reliquie descritti e dimostrati nell'intera loro architettura, 4 vols, Rome, 1848-51: II, pl. XXVIII.
Provenance
Unrecorded.
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