To an approximate scale of 1:4

.EST .IN. CAPITOLIO. (‘It is on the Capitol’); [measurements]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash

Bernardo della Volpaia

This small cornice, only about 30cm tall, was possibly associated with a door or window, and it was seen, as the caption in antique-style capitals indicates, on the Capitoline Hill. Most of its components – corona, egg-and-dart and dentils mouldings – are unexceptional, but its modillions are distinctive insofar as they are ‘back to front’, being convex at the top rather than the bottom as is the norm. This makes them rather like the corbels in the frieze seen in the neighbouring Cancelleria entablature (Drawing 2), and the cornice is drawn so that several of its decorative elements are in alignment. It is even conceivable that the cornice is not antique but fifteenth-century in date, given that a cornice with modillions of this sort, and bearing the same leaf decoration, is seen inside the drum of Santa Maria della Pace, a church begun in 1482 (see Davies forthcoming). If so, the drawing could be connected with the fifteenth-century renovations of around the same date undertaken to either the Palazzo Senatorio or Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill. As with the adjacent entablature of the Cancelleria, it gives the impression of showing a corner, to be like for the drawing immediately beside it but possibly following the same representational convention employed in the drawing used as a source. It was copied by Michelangelo and also, rather imprecisely, by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB 4Av: right side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, pp. 49–50; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 122–23); [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 2 (Thelen 1967, 1, pp. 11–12)

Ashby 1904, p. 44
Census, ID 45091

Drawing

Digitisation of the Codex Coner has been made possible through the generosity of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin.

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