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  • image Adam vol.26/181

Reference number

Adam vol.26/181

Purpose

Design for a ceiling after the antique composed as a cruciform with a central rose containing figures, with circular panels in the four quadrants and hexagonal panels, all surrounded by a triple border.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border (trimmed at bottom) 457 x 445

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is one of a set of highly-finished, coloured drawings of a similar size (see Adam vol.26/168, 169, 179-182, 185, 187, 189 and 190) by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), which parallel those found in Adam volumes 15 and 16. The design here can be compared with pl.LXXIII, the 'Ceiling imitated at the Villa Madama', in Charles Cameron, The Baths of the Romans, 1772, although the subjects of the various panels are different in this drawing from those given by Cameron. There is a version of this composition, 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.93).

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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