Severed from both the medieval brick wall of the convent by which it was once flanked on the right, as well as the stone buttressing that fortified it on the left, and missing several of the original segments, the arch was in a precarious state of decay at the turn of the 19th century. The somewhat controversial decision in the early 1820s to dismantle and reconstruct the arch—replacing, for example, the missing marble columns with locally sourced travertine stone—as a freestanding structure rather than preserve the monument in its current state, resulted in a structure that by the early 1860s when Robert MacPherson took this photograph was little more than a composite of unified, but disparate materials, methods, and meanings. The structure is described in Arthur Hugh Clough's 1858 Amours de Voyage: "