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  • image Adam vol.57/85
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/85

Purpose

Capriccio showing part of a ruined circular temple on a rocky outcrop with an aqueduct and circular building in the landscape in the background, and water in the foreground.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 85

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen; brown, grey and blue washes179 x 123

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pencil capriccio of a group of classical sculptures including an urn with stele on either side.

Notes

The temple is close to the Temple of the Vesta at Tivoli, as is the immediate setting. There is a more accurate drawing of the same view in Adam vol.57/91, and two by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 119 and 192). The aqueduct may be based on the Acqua Marcia and the circular building may be the Tempio della Tosse mausoleum, although their juxtaposition is an imaginative one. Robert Adam was at Tivoli for some time in June 1755 staying with Allan Ramsay in the Villa d'Este (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.174). However, the drawing being a capriccio may have been made at any time.

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).