Grand Tour Black Porphyry Plinths

A pair of small Grand Tour plinths, each a turned cylinder of black porphyry set on an ogee socle of white Carrara marble. Italian, after 1800.

Why we love it

Black porphyry — porfido nero antico — is the scarcest of the antique porphyries, worked from Egyptian quarries and always in far smaller quantity than the imperial purple variety. Its dense, near-black groundmass is scattered with pale feldspar crystals.

The pairing of black and white specimen marbles was a favourite conceit of Roman workshops supplying travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Egyptian quarries were shut in late antiquity and effectively never worked again, so nothing has come out of the ground for some 1,500 years. Everything cut since — Renaissance objects and small Grand Tour pieces such as these — was salvaged from Roman columns or fragments, which accounts for the modest scale of most surviving examples.

Plinths of this scale were made to raise something small and good: a bronze reduction, an intaglio, a fragment of antiquity, a wax portrait. Used as a pair they work well as objects in their own right.

Dimensions

Base (diameter): 11 cm / 4.5”

Top (diameter): 8 cm / 3.25”
Height: 6.5 cm / 2.5”

Condition

Ready for placement and immediate use. Historic chips as is evident from the images.