ROMAN MINIATURE OBJECT

43

One corner of a miniature stand or altar. Made of copper alloy, one corner has its upper knob surviving but is missing its leg. Two sides survive incomplete. One is decorated with a recessed rectangular panel containing a raised quatrefoil within a circle. The other has a recessed panel with bilobed end containing two raised curving bands. No enamel survives in either panel. Below the decorated panels, the leg and bottom of the sides appears to have been cut off in a neat straight line, perhaps in antiquity. The top survives merely as a narrow flange running along the top of the sides. I think that it is unlikely that this fragment belongs to the same miniature stand or altar as the similar sf4427, partly because the surviving knobs on sf4427 are very much larger and partly because of the odd way that the leg has been cut straight off. In addition, the decorated panels of sf4428 (although they are very fragmentary) both appear to have been different to any of the surviving panels on sf4427.