A Roman marble strigillated sarcophagus

Footnotes

Provenance:
Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (1776-1839), 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Stowe, Buckinghamshire, found by him in 1828, near the tomb of Cecilia Metella outside the walls of Rome.
Richard Plantagenent Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (1797-1861), 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Stowe, Buckinghamshire.
Contents of Stowe House, Christie, Manson and Woods Ltd., 3 October 1848, lot 115.
William Lowther (1787-1872), 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, Lowther Castle, Penrith, Cumberland.
Thence by descent to Lancelot Lowther (1867-1953), 6th Earl of Lonsdale.
Lowther Castle, near Penrith, Cumberland. The Major Part of the Earl Lonsdale's Collection, Maple & Co., Ltd., and Thomas Wyatt, Penrith, Cumberland, 29 April-1 May 1947, lot 2295.
The Manor House at Ashby Folville, Leicestershire.
Heathcote Ball & Co., Leicester, 15 March 1984, no. 116.
Sotheby's, London, 10-11 December 1984, lot 348.
New York Private Collection, Antiquities, Sotheby's, New York, 3 June 2015, lot, 57.
Ancient Sculpture & Works of Art, Sotheby's, London, 4 December 2018, lot 48.
Property of a gentleman, acquired at the above sale.

Published:
Henry Rumsey Forster, The Stowe Catalogue Priced and Annotated, London, 1848, p. 271, no. 115.
Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Cambridge, 1882, p. 500, no. 108.
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. VI: Inscriptiones urbis Romae latinae, part 3, Berlin, 1886, p. 2317, no. 22441 (= CIL VI 22441), for the inscription.
Alessandro Teatini, I marmi Reksten e il collezionismo europeo di antichità tra XVII e XIX secolo, Rome, 2003, p. 124.
The Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society. Transactions, vols. 34-39, 1958, p. 79.
Arachne, no. 11529

The Latin inscription translates: To the Spirits of the departed. To Gaius Messius Sequmdinus [i.e. Secundinus], who lived 17 years and four months.

The 1848 Stowe sale catalogue entry reads: "A Roman sarcophagus, found by the late Duke of Buckingham, in an excavation made by him at Rome, in 1828, near the tomb of Cecilia Metella. It then contained the skeleton of the Roman youth whose name it bears – the bones of which were carefully replaced in the earth. It recently stood in the flower-garden at Stowe, and in it were deposited the remains of the late Duke's favorite dog, who died of extreme old age in 1837............."