FEATURES ARCHIVE

Bathing Beauty
A labrum is commonly regarded as the basin for cold water in the caldarium or hot room of a Roman bath complex. They were made of marble in order to maintain a cool water temperature. They would also have been placed in the atrium of a dwelling in order to collect rain water.

A Specialty Stone
This Roman red marble labrum (circa 2nd–3rd century A.D.) is distinguished not only by its massive size but also by its medium, cottanello antico, a rare variety of marl limestone commonly referred to as scaglia in Italy. Cottanello antico has a high iron content and is thinly veined in calcite, which gives it the red and white coloration you see here. The eponymous marble was only quarried in one location, the town of Cottanello, near the town of Rieti in the Sabine Hills of Latium, approximately 40 kilometers northeast of Rome.

Crossing Paths With Bernini
The Cottanello quarry was closed in late antiquity but reopened in the early 17th century to provide Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini with columns for the nave of the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome. However, because the columns at the Basilica include brown and pink patches and are much coarser than the stone quarried in antiquity and seen in this labrum, it appears that the stones came from different areas of the quarry. The stone quarried in antiquity must have been closer to the geological fault line that was richer in iron, but it was exhausted in antiquity and was thus unavailable to Bernini in the 17th century.