Borghese Vase

The Borghese Vase is a monumental bell-shaped krater sculpted in Athens from Pentelic marble in the second half of the 1st century BC as a garden ornament for the Roman market;[1] it is now in the Louvre Museum.

In his capriccio shown below, the French artist Hubert Robert embellished and enlarged the Borghese Vase for dramatic effect and set it, in atmospherically ruinous condition, on the Aventine overlooking the Colosseum, a position it never occupied.

Robert also painted it in several other settings, including the gardens of Versailles (L'entrée du Tapis Vert) with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

On a reduced scale, the vases made admirable wine coolers in silver, or in silver-gilt, as Paul Storr delivered them to the Prince Regent in 1808 (Haskell and Penny 1981:315).

As decorative objects they have been reproduced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries[6] and remain popular subjects for imitation in bronze or porcelain, for example in Coade stone (a reduced-size Coade stone example dating from 1770-1771 stands in the Temple of Flora at Stourhead),[7][8] and also in jasper ware by Josiah Wedgwood (c. 1790), who adapted the form of the Medici Vase for the bas-reliefs and provided it with a lid and a neoclassical drum pedestal.