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  • image Adam vol.57/23
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/23

Purpose

Italy: Baia: The Imperial Villa. View over the ruins of the imperial villa at Baia, with three vaulted niches in the foreground, and the Temple of Diana or Venus in the distance.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Baia; in ink 23

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, brown and grey washes, with white and white chalk heightening, on grey paper; pencil framing line228 x 319 (trimmed)

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (attributed to)

Notes

This drawing attributed to Charles-Louis Clérisseau is one of several views made of the thermal complex at Baia; the others are by Robert Adam, see Adam vol.57/15 and 57/43, the latter a more pedestrian version of this view, depicting only the vaulted niches. The use of white chalk and the delicate cloud formations in this view are unlike Adam's style and closer to that of Clérisseau. This drawing demonstrates effectively the scattering of ruins of the original thermal establishments, which included the Temples of Venus, Diana and Mercury, and which are shown in the plan in Paoli, Avanzi Delle Antichita Esistenti a Pozzuoli Cuma e Baja, Naples, 1768, pl.XLII, pl.II.

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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