This magnificent antique marble architectural element, probably from a cornice, is decorated with fleurons and oves.
Made up of two decorated friezes, this cornice fragment is part of a corpus of Gallo-Roman architectural elements. The upper frieze features two four-petal florets with a central button carved in relief, each set in a hollow delineated by a plant roundel. The lower frieze features oves, brooded in spaces separated by geometric elements.
Gallo-Roman cornices, produced in the 1st century AD and found in the south of France, feature this decoration in more monumental dimensions. Here, in this cornice of the public monument on the Place de la Calade, now preserved in Nîmes at the Musée de la Romanité, we see similar decorations of friezes of carved fleurons and oves, separated by geometrical elements.
The depth of the carving and the visible trepan marks express the extraordinary, albeit fragmentary, quality of this marble element.