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  • image Adam vol.26/65
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/65

Purpose

Record drawing of a candelabrum base showing Eros holding a shield, with two rams' heads at the top and the base supported by sphinxes and foliage, with a central anthemion.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil382 x 256

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Notes

This drawing is a more simplified companion to the three wash drawings of similar candelabra in Adam vol.26/173. The composition can be compared with 'summer' from the Four Seasons of an antique candelabra that was housed at the Villa Farnesina during James Adam's period in Rome. A similar one is at the Villa Albani (see P. Bober & R. Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, Oxford, 2011, cat. 57, 89). There is a drawing in the Albani collection from which this sheet may have been copied when the collection was in James Adam's possession in 1762 (see Cornelius Vermeule, 'The Dal Pozzo-Albani drawings of classical antiquities at Windsor Castle', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 56, No. 2, 1966, p.101). There is also a similar form, as a funerary altar, illustrated as plate 50 in volume 2, part 1 of B. de Monfauçon, L'Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (10 vols., Paris, 1719), after Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709), plate 1.

Notes updated in 2023 thanks to assistance from Professor James Grantham Turner

Level

Drawing

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

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).