Colossal Marble Foot with Sandal

This colossal foot is carved by hand from white marble with grey veining and wears an elaborately worked sandal: a thick, layered sole that extends beyond the toes, a broad strap across the instep with a round button, and at the ankle a bow knot with two hanging loops. Just above the ankle the shaft is cut at an angle, as with a fragment that has broken away from a larger statue. The model is the Colossal Marble Foot in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden (inv. Pb 144), which came from the seventeenth-century collection of the Reynst brothers and entered the museum collection in 1818 with the bequest of Gerard van Papenbroek. The museum regards the piece as an early modern addition: from the sixteenth century onwards it was common practice to complete incomplete Roman marbles with new marble, and precisely these additions are preserved because they show how earlier generations dealt with antiquity. At well over twice the length of a real foot, the fragment makes a quiet centrepiece on a console, a sideboard or a low pedestal, where its reclining silhouette sets it apart from the standing sculptures around it, adding a classical accent to both a modern and a traditional interior. This is not an antique, but a new, hand-carved piece after a museum model.