probable that rosso antico, like the Italian red marbles, belongs to one or other of the Liassic formations, which, in Italy as well as in Greece and Asia Minor, constitutes a well-marked geological horizon by its regular stratification and its characteristic ammonite fossils.  The quantity found among the Roman ruins of this marble is very large; many of the shops in Rome carving their models of classical buildings in this material.  But the fragments are comparatively small.  When used in architecture they have been employed to ornament subordinate features in some of the grander churches.  The largest specimens to be seen in Rome are the double-branched flight of seven very broad steps, leading from the nave to the high altar of Santa Prassede.  Napoleon Bonaparte, a few months 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