Polychrome column in Italian marbles - late 18th century

Polychrome column in giallo antico, bardiglio and white Carrara marbles Italy.
Late 18th - early 19th century.
H. 96 cm; 101 cm with base; l. 17 cm (at base).


This elegant tricolor column features a shaft in giallo antico, more precisely giallo carnagione, whose color is said to be carne e rosa con macchie gialle tendenti al marrone polveroso, i.e. "flesh and pink with yellow spots tending towards dusty brown", cf. Manuale dei marmi romani antichi, Rome, 2004, p. 97. This shaft shows a certain entasis, i.e. the shaft is curved in a very gentle curve: this is the mark of a deep knowledge of ancient architecture:



At the time of the Parthenon, this curvature is particularly subtle: unlike the curvature of Roman art, it is not obtained by widening the diameter, which reaches its maximum around the lower third of the height, giving the column the appearance of a cigar, but by a continuous thinning, increasingly marked from the lower diameter, according to a very gentle curve (Ginouvès 1981, p. 113).

Although its entasis has the subtlety of Greek architecture, the order of this column, however, is Doric and Roman. The particularity of this Doric order is that it is fluted; the flutes are fluted with a rod exactly one-third of the way up the shaft.

It is crowned with a gorgerin at the top, which marks the birth of the capital. The gorgerin is decorated with four rosettes, surmounted by three annelets, a spine with a motif of oves and darts and a carved carving in white Carrara marble. At its base, the column rests on a stylobate with a torus and crown of leaves, also in Carrara marble. The Carrara stylobate in turn rests on a bardiglio marble plinth.

The composition of the marbles on this column makes an Italian provenance likely, all the marbles being from Italy or North Africa: the bardiglio and white marble being both quarried in Carrara; the polychromy, the nature of the motifs and the archaeological rigor of its workmanship mean that the column was made around the second part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th century.


Sources
René Ginouvès, L'Art grec, Vendôme, 1981.

René Ginouvès et al, Dictionnaire méthodique de l'architecture grecque et romaine, t. II, Rome, 1992.