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  • image SC66
Cast SM SC66. Before conservation, July 2012. ©A.C. Cooper (colour) Limited

Cast of a Greco-Roman bucolic relief

c.1820, made

Rome

Plaster cast

Museum number: SC66

On display: Staircase - second to third floor (pre-booked tours only)
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

This relief depicts a cow, with its suckling calf, drinking from a basin. To the left is the figure of a hunter with a lagobolon [staff], from which two birds (ducks?) are hanging, slung over his left shoulder. In the background is a tree adjacent to a high wall beyond which can be seen the pediment of a temple.

Cast of a Greco-Roman original from Otricoli, Italy (discovered in 1776) in the Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino, Sala degli Animali (Vatican inventory no. 365), dating from first century BC/AD. The cast incorporates an elaborate frame composed of taenia, cyma reversa and torus mouldings, the work of later restorers along with part of the ground, most of the underarm of the man and the cow's horn.

Provenance help-art-provenance

Acquired by Soane from the architect Lewis Wyatt, 1834.

Literature

Jan Zahle, Thorvaldsen: Collector of Plaster Casts from Antiquity and the Early Modern Period, 2020, Vol. II, p.200, Thorwaldsen inventory no. L304 and Vol. III, p.232 (illustration of Thorwaldsen example).

Associated items

SC64, identical frame


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