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  • image Adam vol.27/48

Reference number

Adam vol.27/48

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Santa Maria del Priorato. Design showing the entrance elevation of the church; below is a plan of the façade and entrance steps. Below the framing lines at the bottom of the sheet is part of another plan which has been trimmed.

Aspect

Elevation, plans

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a later hand inside of houses

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly early 1760s

Medium and dimensions

Pen, double ink framing lines, tracing on silk paper 304 x 182, the sheet has two horizontal foldlines

Hand

Adam Office

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 26.This drawing, which is clearly a copy, probably belongs with similar copy drawings (see Adam vol.26/177 and 178). Work on remodelling the church of Santa Maria del Priorato and its surroundings was undertaken by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) between 1764 and 1766, and there are several drawings for it in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see C. Denison, Exploring Rome: Piranesi and His Contemporaries, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 1993, pp.52-55). This drawing shows the attic storey later destroyed by French artillery during the Risorgimento of 1867 (see J. Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, London, 1993, p.98). The copy may have been made for James Adam before his departure for Rome in May 1763. There is also part of an earlier plan at the bottom of the sheet, outside the ink framing line.

Literature

D. Stillman, 'Robert Adam and Piranesi' in Essays in the History of Architecture presented to Rudolf Wittkower, 1967, pl.XXI/3J. Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, London, 1993, pl.95

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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