before his fall, had ordered these slabs of
_rosso antico_ to be sent to Paris to ornament his throne; but
fortunately the order came too late to be executed. The cornice of the
present choir is also formed of this very rare marble; while large
fragments of the old cornice of the same material, which ran round the
whole church, are preserved in the Belvedere Cortile of the Vatican.
Tradition asserts that the pieces which have been converted to these
sacred uses in the church once belonged to the house of Pudens, the
father of its titular saint, in which St. Peter is supposed to have
dwelt when in Rome. The entrance to the chamber of the Rospigliosi
Palace, which contains the far-famed "Aurora" of Guido Reni on the
ceiling, is flanked by a pair of Roman Ionic columns of _rosso
antico_, fourteen feet high, which are the largest in Rome, although
the quality of the marble is much injured by its lighter colour, and
by a white streak which runs up each shaft nearly from top to bottom.
In the sixth room of the Casino of the Villa Borghese the jambs of the
mantelpiece are composed of _rosso antico_ in the form of caryatides
supporting a broad frieze of the same material wrought in bas-relief.

This marble seems to have been the favourite material in which to
execute statues of the Faun; for every one who has visited the Vatican
Sculpture Gallery and the Museum of the Capitol will remember well the
beautiful statues of this mythic being in _rosso antico_, which are
among their chief treasures, and once adorned the luxurious Villa of
Hadrian at Tivoli. This marble is admirably adapted for such
sculpture, for it gives to the ideal of the artist the warm vividness
of life. And it seems a fit colour, as Nathaniel Hawthorne has said,
in which to express the rich, sensuous, earthy side of nature, the
happy characteristics of all wild natural things which meet and mingle
in the human form and in the human soul; the Adam, the red man formed
out of the red clay, in which the life of the animals and the life of
the gods coalesce. In the Gabinetto of the Vatican, along with a large
square tazza of _rosso antico_, is kept a most curious arm-chair of
this marble, called _sedia forata_, found near the Church of St. John
Lateran, upon which, in the middle ages, the Popes were obliged to sit
at their installation in the presence of the Cardinals. This custom,
which was practised as late as the coronation of Julius II. in 1503,
arose from a de