Twisted Mystery: The Music Room’s Marble Columns

This blog post is by docent and guest contributor Randy Hans.

As a volunteer docent, I consider myself lucky to be able to learn about the beautiful art and objects in the collection at Caramoor. Among the many treasures that Walter Rosen placed in the Rosen House are the reddish-pink twisted columns that flank the Music Room stage. During the pandemic, in live-streamed and recorded performances, they came to identify Caramoor to music lovers around the world.

These non-load-bearing columns, dating from the late 15^th-century, are made of red Verona marble, an ammonite-bearing, pink-red, nodular limestone occurring near the city of Verona in northern Italy. The twisted columns have six-sided Corinthian capitals and simple bases, and feature short oblong plaques, each carved with a different design, such as lobed leaves, vines, and acanthus, and various rosettes, including a pinwheel, poinsettia, bowknot, spiral, a Greek cross, and even a skull (shown below rotated 90 degrees.)

_{Detail of the memento mori skull skillfully carved into the stage right column in the Music Room.}

The columns were purchased from Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co, a prominent multinational art and antiques dealer.  In the extensive Rosen House archives, Jessa Krick, Director of Interpretation, Collection, and Archives, located the original invoice from May 11, 1937 (excerpt pictured below) which states the columns had been in the collection of Baron Henry-Francois de St. Levé d’Aquerre (1859-1931), a Parisian collector, who had acquired them in Italy some thirty years before.  However, Walter Rosen – a meticulous record-keeper – identified these columns as acquired in 1941 and formerly in the collection of William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), the publishing mogul, mining heir, and voracious art and antiques collector.  We will continue to search for the source of this discrepancy in provenance.

_{Invoice from Arnold Seligman, Rey & Company to Walter Rosen, May 11, 1937. Rosen House archives.}

The invoice from Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co. refers to the 14^th-century Tomb of the Scaligere, a collection of five family tombs located behind the church of Santa Maria Antica in Verona. This grouping includes the tomb of Cansignorio della Scala (pictured below), Lord of Verona from 1359 to 1375, by sculptor Bonino da Campini.  The photo depicts twisted columns with capitals similar to those in the Music Room. These columns support a flamboyant Gothic canopy, surmounted by the equestrian statue of Cansignorio della Scala. This elaborate funerary monument was commissioned as a display of religious piety and a prayer for forgiveness, by a political leader who had gravely sinned by having his own brother murdered, at a time when Italy had emerged from its own pandemic, the Black Death, barely a generation before.

_{Bonino da Campini, Tomb of Cansignorio della Scala, Verona, Italy. Image: https://equestrianstatue.org/cansignorio/}

The twisting design of these columns is often referred to as “barley-sugar” or “Solomonic.” According to legend, two columns of this type flanked the entrance to the First Temple in Jerusalem, built by King Solomon in the 10^th-century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.  Twisted columns used in subsequent centuries are thought to allude to that temple; most notably, the nearly one-hundred-foot-high bronze baroque columns – designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the early 17^th-century – that support the Baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (pictured below.)

_{Gian Lorenzo Bernini, baldacchino of St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy. Image: CNS/Lola Gomez.}

The bedposts of Mrs. Rosen’s Barberini bed, formerly owned by Pope Urban VIII and dating to at least 1640, are also Solomonic columns. Mrs. Rosen’s bedroom will be decorated and back on docent-led tours this holiday season after a lengthy restoration!

Have you encountered twisted columns in your travels? If so, during your next tour of the Rosen House, tell your docent about them. And if you are coming to Caramoor for a December concert or Holiday Tea Musicale, remember to take a look at these unique columns, you can’t miss them in the Music Room!