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  • image Adam vol.57/151

Reference number

Adam vol.57/151

Purpose

Italy: Rome: Casa Guarnieri. View from a window of Casa Guarnieri, over the tiled roofs of neighbouring buildings.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in Robert Adam's hand Sketch from my window in palazzo Guarnieri; in ink 151.

Signed and dated

  • Undated, between February 1755 and May 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and pen198 x 213

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

Robert Adam had lodgings at the Palazzo (Casa) Guarnieri from February 1755 until May 1757 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London,1962, p.151). It was probably situated off the Via Sistina and near the existing Villa Malta, itself on the site of the gardens of Lucullus. The sketch is probably a view over the gardens towards the various buildings of the adjoining monastery and church of San Isidoro, a college of the Irish Franciscans (see Gianbattista Nolli, Nuova Piante di Roma, 1748). The character of Adam's view is supported by an early nineteenth-century painting of the Roman rooftops by John Newbott 'View of Rome from the villa Malta' (see I. Barsali, Ville di Roma: Lazio, Milan, 1970, p.438) and by an anonymous drawing in red chalk of c.1730 reproduced in R. Keaveney, Views of Rome, London, 1988, p.186. The latter drawing shows the same roof system drawn by Adam here, for which there is sketch in Adam vol.55/119 verso. There are two more views by Adam in this area and from the other side of the Villa Malta and Santa Trinita dei Monti (see Adam vol.57/90 and 57/110), and a view of the campanile at Santa Trinita at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (see 3426.47 verso; this may originally have been in the present Adam volume, and acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum through C.J. Richardson. It is numbered in ink 12 by the same hand that numbered Adam vol.57).

Literature

A. A. Tait, Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1996, cat.4

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).