ID AND LOCATION
| Stanford #
| 556 |
| AG1980 #
| 556 |
| PM1960 #
| 556 |
| Slab #
| VII-10 |
| Adjoins
| none |
CONDITION
| Located
| false |
| Incised
| true |
| Surviving
| true |
| Subfragments
| 1 |
| Plaster Parts
| 0 |
| Back Surface
| smooth |
| Slab Edges
| 0 |
| Clamp Holes
| 0 |
| Tassello
| no |
TECHNICAL INFO
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| ANALYSIS
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| Description At top, a row of down-facing tabernae traverses the fragment. Parallel to their front, barely visible along the bottom edge of the fragment, lies a straight double line, recessed, with small, square crenellations at the bottom.
Identification E. Rodríguez-Almeida suggests that the visible heat damage and surface erosion of this fragment indicate it belonged to slab VII-10 (Rodríguez-Almeida 1992, pp. 77-80). Recessed double lines on the Plan are usually reserved for the cella of temples (with a few exceptions in some of the large, imperial monuments) and the line in this fragment may belong to the side of a podium temple. Generally, however, the temple platform is rendered with a single line and the columns that surround the cella are carved as individual, recessed squares. In order for the building in this fragment to depict a temple, the double line would have to represent the outline of the podium. And instead of being individual features, the square columns here seem to merge seemlessly with the inside of this podium wall. The building may not be a temple at all, but part of some other important monument.
Rows of tabernae are ubiquitous on the Plan, and the type depicted here are of the most common type seen on the FUR. Each shop consisted of a single room with a wide opening towards the street that could be screened off at night. The owners may have resided with their families on a wooden platform in the back of the shop.
Significance 3D digital matching may allow us to join this fragment to already identified and located areas on the Plan.
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| HISTORY OF FRAGMENT |
| Like the majority of FUR fragments, this piece was discovered in 1562 in a garden behind the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. From here, it was transferred to the Palazzo Farnese and stored there. It was not among the fragments that were reproduced in the Renaissance drawings that are now kept in the Vatican, but Giovanni Pietro Bellori included it in his 1673 publication. In 1742, the fragment was moved to the Capitoline Museums and exhibited with some of the other known fragments in wooden frames along the main staircase. Since then, it has been stored with the other FUR fragments in various places: the storerooms of the Capitoline Museums (1903-1924), the Antiquarium Comunale (1924-1939), the Capitoline Museums again (1939-1955), the Palazzo Braschi (1955-1998), and since 1998 in the Museo della Civiltà Romana in EUR under the auspices of the Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali del Comune di Roma. (This fragments history corresponds to Iter E as summarized in PM 1960, p. 56.)
Text by Tina Najbjerg |
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| KEYWORDS
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| recessed line, crenellation, tabernae, shops, temple? |
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