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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome, Santa Maria del Priorato. Record drawing of a design for the entrance screen or garden front of the church, showing a pedimented arch flanked by two blind bays with sculpture panels above and urns.
  • image Adam vol.26/178

Reference number

Adam vol.26/178

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Santa Maria del Priorato. Record drawing of a design for the entrance screen or garden front of the church, showing a pedimented arch flanked by two blind bays with sculpture panels above and urns.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand the Waste Side -

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey washes 121 x 270, trimmed diagonally at four corners, three vertical foldlines

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist, possibly George Richardson

Notes

In 1764 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) began reconstruction of the 1568 church of Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome for the Knights of Malta; the building was completed in 1766. Like Adam vol.26/177, which has an inscription in the same hand and similar draughtsmanship, this drawing may be a copy of a finished drawing of c.1763, and the draughtsman may possibly be George Richardson (d. c.1813). The drawing has been folded three times, like Adam vol.26/177, which suggests postal transmission. The drawing shows the church as built, apart from the window panels, and can be compared with an early half-elevation in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, Germany (see J. Scott, Piranesi, London, 1975, p.219).
There is a drawing of the façade of Santa Maria del Priorato in Adam vol.27/48.

Level

Drawing

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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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