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  • image Adam vol.57/157
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/157

Purpose

Italy: Rome: ? Villa Madama on the Monte Mario. View of a wooded hillside showing part of a single-storey villa on a high basement with a loggia facing a garden, supported by a series of arcades.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 157

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and grey wash; pencil framing line163 x 246

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This drawing may be an oblique view of the sixteenth-century Villa Madama on the Monte Mario, Rome, with the arcading that forms the edge of the fishponds. Robert Adam's drawing can be compared with the engraving by Giuseppe Vasi taken from a similar viewpoint (see G. Vasi, Delle Magnificenze di Roma Antica e Moderna, Rome, 1761, pl.185). According to Fleming, Robert Adam '... took careful drawings of Renaissance buildings ... ', which in 1756 included the Villa Madama (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.203). A view of much the same elevation, but in greater detail and attributed to Charles-Louis Clérisseau, is in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 20).

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).