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  • image Adam vol.57/127

Reference number

Adam vol.57/127

Purpose

Capriccio of a three-bay towered structure with giant pilasters with niches, with a relief panels on one bay. The building is supported by a substructure of vaults and arches. In the foreground are classical fragments.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 127

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly September 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen; grey, blue and brown washes253 x 305

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

grapes

Notes

This view by Robert Adam is the same as that by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Adam vol.57/123, although it lacks the fortified scene in the background. Like that of Clérisseau, Adam's view is probably derived from several antique sources, and it may relate to Adam and Clérisseau's trip to Albano in September 1755. It may have been inspired by ruins of mausolea such as that then known as the Tempio della Salute or Tomb of Licinianus Piso on the Via Appia, which is illustrated in Piranesi's Vedute di Roma, 1763. An alternative source may be the Domus Praeconum on the Via dei Cerchi of the Domus Augustiana (see E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, London, 1968, vol.I, p.338). The sculptural relief panel shown here is absent in Clérisseau's view and in the Domus Augustiana.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).