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  • image Adam vol.57/52
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/52

Purpose

Italy: Rome: Santa Constanza. View of the circular church of Santa Costanza on the Via Nomentana, beside two trees. On one side is part of a curved wall and other ruined walls.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 52

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey and brown washes190 x 312

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

coat of arms

Notes

Santa Costanze was originally a mausoleum and the view that Robert Adam has chosen shows remains of the graveyard structures dating from the Constantine period. There is another view of the building by Adam in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 93), which shows the church in considerable detail but from the other side. According to Fleming, his '... charming and painstaking sketches', which included those of Santa Costanza, were probably made in the summer of 1756 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.213). There is a superior version of this composition, identical in size, by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (2395).Adam's drawings of the exterior of what is likely to be the adjoining church of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura (Adam vol.57/63 and 57/64) were probably made at the same time as the current view.

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).