Column Decorated with Vine Scrolls and Crowned by a Composite Capital, with Base and Abacus
Unknown · 450-500
A slender marble column nearly two metres tall is wrapped in climbing vine shoots, with leaves and bunches of grapes twisting up the shaft. It is crowned by a composite capital of acanthus leaves and volutes under a moulded abacus, and stands on its own base. The back is left plain, because the column was always meant to stand against a wall. The vine is both a classical ornament and a Christian symbol of the Eucharist, which suits a church of the fifth century, when the art of late Roman Gaul was becoming Christian without yet changing its language.
The column comes from Notre-Dame la Daurade in Toulouse, a ten-sided church founded in the middle of the fifth century, whose walls were lined with three superimposed rows of niches framed by columns like this one. The building was demolished in 1761, and twenty-four of its columns were gathered by Jean-Francois de Montegut, a member of the Parliament of Toulouse, who used them to build a temple of Apollo in the park of his chateau, dedicated in 1787. A flood wrecked the temple in 1875, and the Louvre bought this column and its companion in 1933 and 1934.
Did You Know? After the church was pulled down, this column spent a century as part of a garden folly dedicated to the god Apollo.
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