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  • image Adam vol.26/168

Reference number

Adam vol.26/168

Purpose

Design for a rectangular ceiling with a central circular panel containing a figure; this is surrounded by four panels with vine-leafed borders; other borders of stylised patterns.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border 454 x 410

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is one of ten (Adam vol. 26/168, 169, 179-182, 185, 187, 189, 190), highly-finished, coloured drawings by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), which parallel those found in Adam volumes 15 and 16. The composition here is virtually identical to the Manocchi scheme in Adam vol.26/182; the differences lie in some of the figure panels and the stylised details of the borders, however, the hand is the same in both. There is another unfinished copy of this ceiling design, partially coloured, in the Manocchi drawings amongst the Hardwick albums in the RIBA (see J. Lever, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973, p.62).

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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