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  • image Adam vol.26/187
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/187

Purpose

Design for a ceiling or antique study for a panel (?) showing a central circular panel containing a female figure carrying an urn in the centre and four other figures in semi-circular panels; beyond this are panels of various shapes containing figures, all within a stylised border.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border 425 x 422

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi (attributed to)

Watermark

Countermark

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. This composition is notable for the naturalism of the figures and scenes in the various panels, which may be compared with those from the Baths of Titus in Robert Adam's 1750 copy of Bartoli, Picturae Antiquae Cryptarum Romanarum (p. 107) (see also Adam vol.26/190). The central section is similar to a composition in the Catacomb of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus (see R. Ling, Roman Painting, Cambridge, 1991, pl.206).

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).