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The lower section of a Roman candelabrum, decorative shaft or baetylus
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The lower section of a Roman candelabrum, decorative shaft or baetylus
Proconnesian marble
Height: 43cm
Circumference: 50cm
Circumference: 50cm
Museum number: M574
Vermeule catalogue number: Vermeule 210
On display: Dome Area
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
This fragment is enriched with scaled date palm leaves rising from larger, foliate sheathing leaves in two layers over the bottom of the bulge.
Two shafts of this shape and parallel enrichment are incorporated into a large candelabrum from Tivoli, now in the Louvre1. There are about twenty date-palm vegetable shafts of baetylus or ordinary shape, and in some cases of exceptional length, in the cloister of the Church of S. Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. They would seem also to have been sections of candelabrum shafts.
1 P. Gusman, La Villa impériale de Tibur (Villa Hadriana), Paris, 1904, p. 255f., fig. 417.
Two shafts of this shape and parallel enrichment are incorporated into a large candelabrum from Tivoli, now in the Louvre1. There are about twenty date-palm vegetable shafts of baetylus or ordinary shape, and in some cases of exceptional length, in the cloister of the Church of S. Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. They would seem also to have been sections of candelabrum shafts.
1 P. Gusman, La Villa impériale de Tibur (Villa Hadriana), Paris, 1904, p. 255f., fig. 417.
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 See Cornelius Vermeule, unpublished catalogue of the Antiquities at Sir John Soane's Museum, Introduction, transcription of Tatham letters, List 3, no.19.
Literature
Tatham: Drawings, 8.
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