3-100-702 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Paul Highnam"/Heritage Images

Cast of part of relief of girl at temple, 18th century. Cast of a section of a marble relief now in the the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Ince Blundell collection). The full marble features part of a temple on the right side. According to the art collector Henry Blundell (1724-1810) it was placed in the Villa Negroni by Pope Sixtus V and later bought by Thomas Jenkins in 1786. Blundell himself purchased it from the collection of Lord Cawdor for 113 guineas. For many years the marble was thought to have been an antique original. However Bernard Ashmole reattributed it to the late eighteenth century in his Catalogue of the Ancient Marbles at Ince Blundell Hall (1929). He believed that what appeared to be breaks and repairs in the piece suggested that it was a deliberate forgery. It is thought that the marble may have been executed by the sculptor, restorer and copyist Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (c1716-1799).