This charming piece is a fragment of a marble column. Composed of a pair of pine cones; resting on a base with pearl garland; on both sides, between the two pine cones are two roses and on the bottom of the piece acanthus leaves are visible as well as a climbing plant.
From the Renaissance period, this fragment is inspired by Antiquity. Indeed, several similar elements dating from the Roman period have been found during excavations. Carved on top of ornamental pillars during the Roman Empire, these decorative elements were of various forms and were taken up by Renaissance sculptors to decorate rich homes.
The ornamental vocabulary of our piece echoes a particular, rarer type of this column type (Sculpture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1977), pp 52). The Sir John Soane’s Museum in London has several antique fragments similar in design to our piece.
The rarity of this object, its state of preservation and the fineness of its chasing make our piece an exceptional and atypical object.