Piranesi Vase

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The Piranesi Vase
The Piranesi Vase

The Piranesi Vase or Boyd Vase is a reconstructed colossal ancient Roman krater on 3 legs and a triangular base, with a relief around the sides of the vase. It is 107 inches (2.71m) tall and 28 inches (0.71m) in diameter. It was produced, with the upper part in the style of the Borghese Vase, from a large number of Roman fragments from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, where Gavin Hamilton was excavating in the 1770s by the artist Piranesi, and sold as a genuine artefact (an acceptable practice at the time). It is now in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, and is BM catalogue number 1868,0512.1.

It and the so-called Warwick Vase are among the most ambitious restoration projects in which Piranesi was involved, and were both represented by three plates each in the 1778 compilation of Vasi, Candelabri e Cippi. In parts the vase is a pastiche - its stem and supports are made up of a variety of unrelated ancient fragments supplemented by matching modern parts - whilst in others it is a painstaking, skillful and accurate reconstruction (the frieze uses numerous original fragments to reproduce a scene of satyrs winemaking from a Roman altar in Naples that in the 18th century was in the collection of the Prince of Francavilla and illustrated in Montfaucon's 1757 Recueil d'Antiquités).

The diary of a Dutch tourist mentions the vase in the Piranesi workshop in 1776. Sometime that year it was acquired by Sir John Boyd during his Grand Tour. He was a wealthy West Indies proprietor and director of the British East India Company, and displayed it in the landscaped grounds of his neo-Palladian mansion Danson House at Bexley (whose dining room's wallpaintings took up the vase's Bacchic themes).

It was purchased from Boyd and Hugh Johnston by the British Museum in 1868. It was exhibited in the Orangery of Kensington Palace from 1955 to 1976.

[edit] Sources

  • T. Opper, "Glory of Rome restored", British Museum Magazine 51 (Spring 2005), 38-40.
  • E. Miller, "The Piranesi Vase", in: A. Oddy (ed.) The Art of the Conservator (London 1992), 122-136.
  • J. Scott, "Some sculpture from Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli", in: Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria: gli antecedenti e il contesto (Rome 1983), 339-355.