Piranesi Vase

The lower part, which was not original, was influenced by the Torlonia Vase, a celebrated neo-Attic Roman marble from the collection of Cardinal Albani.

[1] The vase was restored and/or rebuilt by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, from a large number of Roman fragments from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, where Gavin Hamilton was excavating in the 1770s.

The scene was modeled on a Roman altar in Naples that in the 18th century was in the collection of the Prince of Francavilla and illustrated in Bernard de Montfaucon's 1757 Recueil d'Antiquités.

The vase was sold as a genuine ancient Roman artefact, which was considered an acceptable practice at the time.

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, where the dining room's wallpaintings took up the vase's Bacchic themes.