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  • image Adam vol.7/56

Reference number

Adam vol.7/56

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a rectangular panel showing a battle scene with mounted figures in armour, one falling from his horse, with more figures on either side with banners. In the foreground are wounded and dead figures.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand John kills Crispin primo

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening, partly oxidised, on brown washed paper 173 x 465

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This composition is one of the series of reliefs of contemporary and historic battles (Adam vol.7/47-59), all intended to be part of a programme of iconographical decoration for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The drawings are probably all by Antonio Zucchi (1726-95), with his characteristic use of brown paper. The pencil identification and dating of each historical scene is probably in an early nineteenth-century hand.
Although this is part of the battle series for the Parliament House project, the scene here and in Adam vol.7/57 and 58 is from medieval rather than eighteenth-century history. The dress of the combatants is a curious mixture of several periods.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

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