carved with the bust of a bearded triton playing the lyre and turning his head back, the arm of a nereid wrapped in billowing drapery at left, the tip of another triton's fishtail below.

perhaps Marchese Giustiniani, Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, 17th Century
probably Marchese Giampietro Campana (1808-1880), Villa Campana al Celio
Professor Arthur Lincoln Frothingham (1859-1923), Princeton, New Jersey
his estate (American Art Galleries, New York, The Collection of the late Professor A. L. Frothingham, Princeton University, October 29th-30th, 1924, no. 76b (part of a lot of four relief fragments)
Joseph Brummer (1883-1947), New York, inv. no. 752/c, acquired at the above sale (//libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16028coll9/id/6415)
Franklin Gallery, Beverly Hills
Charlton Heston (1923-2008) Collection, Los Angeles, California, acquired in the late 1950s or early 1960s
Bonhams, London, July 7th, 2016, no. 153, illus. (//www.bonhams.com/auctions/23364/lot/153/?category=list&length=10&page=16)

The only other known example of a marine sarcophagus showing a lyre-playing triton looking back towards a nereid was recorded in the Palazzo Giustiniani in Rome in the 17th Century (Galleria Giustiniana, vol. II, pl. 146 , and A. Rumpf, Die Meerwesen auf den antiken Sarkophagreliefs, 1939, p. 60, no. 136, fig. 92). Its subsequent whereabouts are unknown. The present fragment could either have been part of the Giustiniani sarcophagus itself, now lost and possibly dismembered, or part of another sarcophagus showing the same composition.

It has gone hitherto unnoticed that five or more of the many marble relief fragments acquired by Joseph Brummer in the 1924 Frothingham sale were once embedded into a wall of the Villa Campana al Celio. Brummer inv. nos. N753c, N754b, N756b, e, and f are all visible in a photograph of the wall taken by John Henry Parker sometime between 1869 and 1877 (see G. Nadalini, "La villa-musée du marquis Campana à Rome au milieu du XIXe siècle," Journal des savants, vol. 2, 1996, p. 431, fig. 8, S. Sarti, Giovanni Pietro Campana: 1808-1880: The Man and his Collection, p. 141(?), and //www.bsrdigitalcollections.it/details.aspx?ID=18483&ST=SS). Two other Brummer fragments, each with no photographic record in his archive, are also visible on the Campana wall, and are now in the Duke University Museum of Art, as part of a gift from his widow, Ella Bache Brummer (A Generation of Antiquities: The Duke Classical Collection 1964-1994, 1994, nos. 88 [lot 87💦, illus., i꧑n the Frothingham sale] and 89). 

Frothingham studied in Rome between 1868 and 1881, and in the 1880s was a Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. A report in the John Hopkins University Circulars of 1885 (p. 27) mentions that he organised a temporary exhibition of his 🍬art collection "in the rooms at 106 Monument Street" in Baltimore; among the objects were "some interesting marble fragments, bought from the Campana Collection." It is likely, therefore, that the large majority, if not all of Frothingham's dozens of relief fragments sold in group lots in his estate sale, including the present one, came from the dismantling of the Villa Campana, and were acquired by him in b🐬ulk on the Roman art market shortly after the building was demolished.