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  • image Adam vol.57/76
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/76

Purpose

Italy: Rome: Porta Metronia. View of a ruined square tower with irregular round-headed windows above a gateway arch and three-bay arcading with battlements to one side. It is the Porta Metronia, situated between the Porta Asinaria and Porta Latina.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 76

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, brown, grey and blue washes128 x 171

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pencil sketch of a group of pilastered ruins.

Notes

This drawing by Robert Adam, like the drawing in Adam vol.57/71, is in the style of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand. Although the Porta Metronia still exists, it is much changed, and Adam's drawing is closer to the spirit of the print made by Rossini for Le Porte antiche e moderne del recinto di Roma, 1829 (see E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, London, 1968, vol.II, p.214). This view may be compared with a watercolour in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 55) that shows the Pyramid of Cestius in the background.

Literature

'Bob the Roman', Heroic Antiquity & the Architecture of Robert Adam, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, 2003, cat.58.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).