Italy: Rome, Arcus Argentariorum. Record drawings for part of a pilaster. That on the left shows the foot decorated with twining foliage and rosettes arising from an acanthus plant. Next to this is another, unfinished part of a pilaster decorated with an eagle with a serpent in its beak.

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You are here: CollectionsOnline / Italy: Rome, Arcus Argentariorum. Record drawings for part of a pilaster. That on the left shows the foot decorated with twining foliage and rosettes arising from an acanthus plant. Next to this is another, unfinished part of a pilaster decorated with an eagle with a serpent in its beak.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/70

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Arcus Argentariorum. Record drawings for part of a pilaster. That on the left shows the foot decorated with twining foliage and rosettes arising from an acanthus plant. Next to this is another, unfinished part of a pilaster decorated with an eagle with a serpent in its beak.

Aspect

Elevations

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a later hand Goldsmiths Arch/ at Rome

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk 424 x 287

Hand

Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)

Watermark

coat of arms

Notes

This is a drawing of one of the composite pilasters of the third-century Arcus Argentariorum, Rome (see also Adam vol.26/85). There is a careful study by Giovanni Battista Montano (1534-1621) that James Adam acquired with the Montano drawings in the Albani collection (see L. Fairbairn, Italian Renaissance Drawings from the Collection of Sir John Soane's Museum, 2 vols., London, 1998, II, p.606). There are two perspective views by Robert Adam of the Arch in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 35 and 37). Both drawings are typical of the hand of Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (d.1793) in this volume.

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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