Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing part of the interior of a ruined circular temple. In the foreground is a sarcophagus on a plinth that has a panel showing three heads in relief. On the left are figures.
  • image Adam vol.56/107

Reference number

Adam vol.56/107

Purpose

Capriccio showing part of the interior of a ruined circular temple. In the foreground is a sarcophagus on a plinth that has a panel showing three heads in relief. On the left are figures.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil 66; in red ink on both album leaf and on drawing 107

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, watercolour; ink framing line, beyond which is grey wash140 x 100

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The sculpture of three heads in relief is also depicted in Adam vol.56/98. The composition can be compared with two drawings in Adam volume 57: Adam vol.57/148, which has a sarcophagus with three heads, and an unfinished capriccio in Adam vol.57/146. The delicate, small scale of the drawings may be compared with compositions in the manner of Giovanni Paolo Pannini (d. 1765) in Adam vol.56/67 and 56/70.

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).