altar
- Museum number
- 1805,0703.185
- Description
-
Marble altar decorated with sculptured panels. On the front are two birds drinking from a crater with a festoon of laurel hanging from bull's skulls surmounted by sashes and a rosette. On the right side is an oinochoe and on the left a patera, both vessels used in sacrificial rites. The base and cornice are restored.
- Production date
- 1stC
- Dimensions
-
Height: 59.69 centimetres
-
Width: 52.07 centimetres
-
Depth: 36.83 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- Cook 2011, nr. 221:
‘A cinerary urn, with a modern plinth and Cornish, near two feet square; on the front are represented two pidgeons standing on the edge of a vase under a festoon of laurel hanging from two skulls of Bulls, in the center of which is ye Rose with the symbolic protuberance in the middle of it. on the sides are a patera and a præfericulum’ (TY 12/3, dining room 30). In the Towneley Hall version, ‘urn’ is corrected to ‘cippus’, and ‘cornish’ to ‘cornice’.
Bought from Albacini in April 1777 for 20 Scudi (TY 8/51, cf. the copy of Albacini’s receipt dated 10 April 1777, TY 8/107). This amount was the equivalent of rather less than £5, but was rendered by Townley as £8 (TY 12/1). The cippus appears on the list of objects to be sent from Carlo’s (TY 10/13).
Date:
Tiberian (Dräger).
Drawings:
* Townley drawing 2010,5006.229;
* Nollekens: B. F. Cook, `The Townley Marbles in Westminster and Bloomsbury’, The British Museum Yearbook, 2 (1977), 45, figs. 26-27, no. 24;
* Chambers: B. F. Cook, `The Townley Marbles in Westminster and Bloomsbury’, The British Museum Yearbook, 2 (1977), 42-43, figs. 24-25, no. 29.
Bibliography:
- Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum (1808), VI.58;
- Ancient Marbles of the British Museum, X, pl. 54, fig. 2;
- A Guide to the Graeco-Roman Sculptures in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1874 [1892] and 1876), II, no. 58;
- A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, Vol. III (London 1904), 390, no. 2493;
- O. Dräger, Religionem significare. Studien zu reich verzierten römischen Altären und Basen aus Marmor. RM Ergänzungsheft 33 (Mainz, 1994), 199, no. 22, pl. 80.3.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1805
- Department
- Greek and Roman
- Registration number
- 1805,0703.185
