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  • image Adam vol.57/70
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/70

Purpose

Italy: Venice: San Giogio Maggiore. View of the canal-front of San Giorgio Maggiore showing the campanile, dome and the adjacent monastic buildings.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 70

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown, grey and blue washes127 x 188

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pencil sketch of arcading with a villa above

Notes

This view was probably made by Robert Adam when he was in Venice on his way to or from Spalatro. He spent some weeks there after 11 September 1757, where he particularly studied Palladio, in both Venice and Vicenza, and was especially interested in the 'Villa of Noble Venetians mostly by the Celeberrimo ed'Illustre Palladio'. Despite the length of his stay, there are few surviving studies of Venetian scenes. This watercolour exemplifies the final level of drawing skills that Adam attained before his return to London, and as such it is later in date than the rest of the drawings in this section of Adam volume 57, as well as being the only obviously non-Roman drawing. However, it has not always been part of this volume. It is overlapped by Adam vol.57/67 and is missing two corners.

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).