Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing an irregular building or church, with an octagonal centre block with cross above. There are two projecting porticos with pediments, linked by colonnades to a similar, asymmetric wing. There is a plan of the building, but omitting the asymmetric wing to the right. It shows the linking colonnades forming both an oval and an octagon.
  • image Adam vol. 55/40

Reference number

Adam vol. 55/40

Purpose

Capriccio showing an irregular building or church, with an octagonal centre block with cross above. There are two projecting porticos with pediments, linked by colonnades to a similar, asymmetric wing. There is a plan of the building, but omitting the asymmetric wing to the right. It shows the linking colonnades forming both an oval and an octagon.

Aspect

Perspective, plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 40; and in pencil in a contemporary hand La Vrai Eglise

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk276 x 156

Hand

Laurent Benoît Dewez (attributed to)

Verso

Print of the figure of Neptune with the following inscription below: Elegantissimum hoc Neptuni / Vetus simulacrum aereum / In Sicilia repentum, nunc extat apud / Carolum Hope Scoto-Britanicum/Anno 1755. / Pecheux R delt. Anto Zaballi.

Notes

The drawing is on the recto of the print described below. Robert Adam was in Naples, Italy with Charles Hope (1710-1791) in April 1755, when the latter probably acquired the sculpture. According to Fleming '...he appears to have bought several antique marbles while in Italy ..', and this may be one of them (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.356). The drawing was probably made after Adam and Hope had returned separately to Rome from Naples, and when Adam commissioned a series of studies after the antique from Laurent Pecheux (1729-1821) (see Fleming, op.cit. 1962, p.163). The verso of Adam vol.55/150 shows that Hope was borrowing money from Adam around this time. The date of the print, 1755, by Antonio Zaballi (1738-1785) confirms that the drawings in this volume belong to the period after April 1755. Adam's own drawings of his trip to Naples are in volume 57. It is possible that the perspective of the church is a topographical view rather than a capriccio, and the hand may possibly be that of Laurent Benoít Dewez (see volume 9).

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).