Plain column shaft

Plain column shaft, fully preserved and carved in a single block of “Bigio antico” marble with white veins and dark grey patches; the quality of “Bigio antico” here used is the pebbly one with a very dark hue of colour, given by the stains, streaks and wavy lines of black and the very few white veins. Both the surface and the shaft’s ends have been repolished and reworked. The summit of the shaft is carved with an astragal (h. 3 cm, projecting 2 cm), a flat fillet (h. 1.5 cm) and a thin cavetto (h. 0.5 cm, projecting 0.4 cm), while the bottom end is cut with a cavetto (h. 1 cm) and a flat fillet (h. 3 cm, projecting 0.7 cm). On the top surface there is a square hole (w. 6 cm, d. 2 cm) for a fastening dowel. The shaft is placed over a not pertaining, modern base of the XIX century.

It is difficult to set our piece in a precise chronological frame, since “Bigio antico” marble was widely employed and extracted in numerous quarries throughout antiquity; it was also very often used in private contexts for both revetment panels and medium-scale columns.