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  • image Adam vol.57/137

Reference number

Adam vol.57/137

Purpose

Capriccio of a group of antique fragments piled together, which include an Ionic capital and a block of highly decorated frieze and cornice.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 137

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Grey wash161 x 308

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

View in grey wash of a tiled roof with a decorated antique cornice below.

Notes

This sketch can be compared with a similar drawing of a group of fragments by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Adam vol.57/140 and another in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 109). The accumulation of such fragments was characteristic of Piranesi's tombs in his early Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive, 1743. The Colonna gardens, Rome, had a similar composition of the pediment and frieze from the Temple of Serapis, of which there are several drawings in Adam volume 26 (see Adam vol.26/52 and 69).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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