Byzantine Corinthian column capital

Corinthian column capital with kalathos (h. 56 cm) dressed with two crowns of spiky acanthus of Byzantine type (h. of the first crown 29 cm; h. of the second crown 54 cm). The leaves show a mid rib worked in relief, that bifurcates in the lower part of the page, and lobes, separated by drop-shaped voids, made of three spiky points worked with a central incision which grants them a V-shaped section. The points of the inferior lobes touch one another, thus forming a series of geometrical shapes that, from the bottom towards the top, take the form of a small drop, a kite, a large triangle and another kite. At either side of the central folia remain some scanty traces of the calyx leaves that originally supported the volutes but that were almost completely effaced by subsequent re-carving. In fact, the whole superior part of the capital shows patent signs of reshaping: in correspondence of the upper kalathos rim there is a lowered plane, with traces left by a pointed chisel, that severs the calyx leaves and strongly marks the division from the surface in which the volutes are engraved. The latter unroll at the sides of a large central flower with a horizontal arrangement that denotes the loss of every structural meaning, and they are realized by means of rough incision, a kind of handling that strongly contrasts with the neat and deep carving of the foliage. As far as the foliage is concerned, that is the kind of acanthus, the capital fully fits into the well attested series of exemplars produced between the end of the V and the beginning of the VI century AD by Constantinopolitan workshops and exported throughout the whole Mediterranean. Amongst these artefacts we may for example recall two capitals in the Church of St. Mary Deaconess in Constantinople and at least other three reused in some of the city’s cisterns, several exemplars now in the Museum of Alexandria, one re-employed in the Mosque of Amr Ibn el-As in Cairo, as well as many of the capitals in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. A particularly instructive comparison can be made with a capital in the Church of St. Nicholas in Bari, which is again a product of the same Eastern workshops but which, sometimes during the XI century, underwent the reshaping of the upper part, where pairs of horizontal volutes roughly engraved. Our capital is therefore datable between end of the V and the beginning of the VI century, but it retains some subsequent Medieval re-workings.