Italy: Rome, Piazza del Campidoglio. Record drawing of a free-standing trophy, possibly from the rear, showing a fur cloak with shoulder belt and capped head. It is flanked by the back shields and has more shields and armour at the base.

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Italy: Rome, Piazza del Campidoglio. Record drawing of a free-standing trophy, possibly from the rear, showing a fur cloak with shoulder belt and capped head. It is flanked by the back shields and has more shields and armour at the base.

Browse

Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

Adam vol.26/92

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Piazza del Campidoglio. Record drawing of a free-standing trophy, possibly from the rear, showing a fur cloak with shoulder belt and capped head. It is flanked by the back shields and has more shields and armour at the base.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, brown wash on brown washed paper, ink framing lines 586 x 379

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This is one of a set of four trophy drawings, Adam vol.26/89-92, all attributed to Antonio Zucchi (1726-95), probably all related to the Trophies of Marius from the balustrade of the Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome. The two Campidoglio trophies were moved there from the nymphaeum of the Aqua Giulia in 1590 (see E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, London, 1968, vol.II, p.125). They would be well known to James Adam from Giovanni Battista Piranesi's engravings in the Trofei di Ottaviano Augusto, 1753 (see G.B. Piranesi, Le Rovine del Castello dell'Acqua Giulia, 1761, pl.XVII) and in the Trofei itself, and later appeared in Robert Adam's work at Syon, Osterley and Newby (see D. Stillman, The Decorative Work of Robert Adam, London, 1966, p.64). This drawing may show the rear of the trophy in Adam vol.26/91.
There were other forms of the trophy extant in Rome in the eighteenth century, such as those now in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, then in the Villa Medici. In addition, there were the trophy reliefs on Trajan's columns that were recorded by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) as 'différentes recherches sur les armes, le costume et les différentes instruments des anciens; ces différentes pièces sont puisés d'après des bas reliefs des statuës et des pientures antiques où d'après des desseins fort ancien et fort rare qui avoient été puisés dans la même source'. (For an account of the acquisition of this collection by Catherine II, see 'Un asyle glorieux' in Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.66-72). There is another series of small trophy compositions in Adam vol.7/71, and panels based on the theme in Adam vol.19/98-99 by Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82) of 1766, with similar compositions by him also of 1766 in album 5 of the Hardwick Drawings in the RIBA (see 5/28; see J. Lever, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973).

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).