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Posted on 06/19/2026 6:54:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Its scene was sketched by the Italian artist Battista Franco Veneziano before 1530; the sketch is currently housed at the Städel Museum in Germany.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US also has a 16th-century sketch of the sarcophagus, attributed to an unknown artist.
In 1882, it was included in the book Ancient Marbles in Great Britain by Adolf Michaelis.
In 2010, an anonymous visitor posted a picture of the object in the Blenheim grounds to TripAdvisor with the Blenheim Palace, "a flower bed that looks like a Roman lenos sarcophagus". A lenos sarcophagus is one that is shaped like a bathtub...
The marble panel – the only surviving part of the sarcophagus – had been attached to a tub to serve as a garden feature. Once removed, it measured some 2 meters (6.6 feet) in length and weighed close to 400 kilograms (880 pounds)...
So how did it evade notice for so long, with so many visitors regularly passing it by?
It's likely that many assumed it was a reproduction, as can be found in so many gardens and estates.
But many, according to ancient historian and archaeologist Christopher Dickenson of Oxford University in the UK, probably just assumed, as he did, that Blenheim staff already knew what they had...
People visiting Blenheim can now see the artifact in a more appropriate setting and appreciate it for what it truly is: a relic of ancient funerary traditions that has survived for centuries, not a receptacle for tulips...
The object is only known to have come into the hands of the 5th Duke of Marlborough, who owned the palace at the time, sometime in the 19th century.
How he acquired it, and when, may never be discovered.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
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Thanks for the link!
[singing] How many kinds of sweet flowers grow...
You know that thing would have cost a small fortune and taken years to manufacture...............
That's a shame, in my opinion. Seems to me it was right where it was supposed to. For its benefits and ours both.
They probably had the process perfected and pounded them out like they were using a mold and molten silver.
I say keep it as a planter
That looks very similar to a flower pot I got from Target several years ago.
I wonder...
Looking at the base, it seems like the cat already knocked it over once.
Probably in Roman times.
And about once a year since.
Cats gotta be cats.
:>)
That makes a dandy flower pot!
Only a revisionist would use that term, not a historian, especially for Roman sculpture created in the third century AD (Anno Domini), two centuries after the AD dating system started.
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