19TH CENTURY

Discovered in the late 16th century, the Borghese vase was in that family's collections by 1645. It was bought from Prince Camillo Borghese in 1807 by his brother-in-law Napoleon Bonaparte and is now in the Louvre. The Medici vase was almost certainly in their Florentine collection by the mid-16th century. Now thought to date from the second-half of the 1st Century A.D., it is in the Uffizi. When paired as here, it was customary for the copy of the Borghese vase to be given the krater form of the Medici vase when the original does not have handles.