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  • image Adam vol.57/148
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/148

Purpose

Capriccio of a meta on a base with three relief busts and inscriptions on either side, set in a landscape with a large domed building and a four-bay arcade with trees behind.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 148

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, grey wash280 x 206

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The Meta Sudans beside the Colosseum in Rome was excavated in 1743 and this may have inspired Robert Adam's capriccio. There is a similar drawing in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 189), which shows the same meta beside a large lake; it also has the three relief busts and the same inscription as in this drawing: 'Meta Cipci Antica'.A meta is a conical marker post.

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).