Passionate about history, Ferdinand de Rothschild was also very interested in where the artworks he collected came from (what we call provenance). No price was too great for a piece associated with a personality, or significant collector from the past. Famously Samson Wertheimer bid a staggering £6000 at the Hamilton Palace Sale for Baron Ferdinand for a Writing Table that was clearly documented as having once belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette (r. 1777-1792) of France (now at Waddesdon Manor, no. 2546). To understand why Samson Wertheimer was prepared to pay the sum of £1365 for the porphyry vases at this same sale, one must first examine the material itself and its significance. Porphyry is far more than a mere mineral; for two millennia, it has served as a physical manifestation of sovereign power. Known as lapis porphyrites in Antiquity, this exceptionally dense volcanic stone was sourced from a single, desolate location: Mount Gebel Dokhan.[3] Its deep purple hue, produced by minute particles of haematite, mirrored the ‘Tyrian purple’ dye extracted from murex snails, a pigment so prohibitively expensive that its use was restricted by law.[4] From the Constantinian era onwards, porphyry was solidified as the ‘Imperial Stone’, reserved for the sarcophagi of emperors and the monolithic columns of the most sacred basilicas. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Egyptian quarries were lost to the Western world, only to be rediscovered in 1822 by James Burton (1786-1862) and John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875).[5] Consequently, every work of porphyry produced during the Renaissance or the Baroque era was spoliated and recycled. To possess a porphyry vase in the seventeenth or eighteenth century was to own a literal fragment of Rome, reconfigured and polished into a contemporary form. The significance of this noble material, as well as the artistic value of the vases, would not have been lost on Baron Ferdinand.