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Folio 2 recto (Ashby 2): Colosseum (ground level)
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Reference number
SM volume 115/2
Purpose
Folio 2 recto (Ashby 2): Colosseum (ground level)
Aspect
Plan
Scale
To an approximate scale of 1:1000
Inscribed
[Drawing] HICNOGRAFIA. ANPHITEATRI. VESPASIANI. SIVE. DOMITIAN[I] (‘plan of the amphitheatre of Vespasian or Domitian’); S[eptentrio] (‘North’); M[eridies] (‘South’); 1 [early seventeenth-century hand]
[Mount] 2 [x2]
Signed and dated
- c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14
Medium and dimensions
[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and light grey-brown and brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks; on laid paper (231x164mm), overlaid patch at top (to correct inscription), stitching holes along left edge, rounded corners at right, inlaid (window on verso of mount)
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; seal of Benzoni–Dal Pozzo family at bottom
Hand
Bernardo della Volpaia
Notes
The Coner compilation begins its survey of Rome’s ancient buildings with a ground plan of the Flavian amphitheatre (Rossella 2001a and 2001b; Elkins 2019), today known universally as the Colosseum. This vast and imposing monument situated just east of the Roman Forum was begun under Vespasian in 72 CE (LTUR 1993–2000, 1, pp. 30–35; Rea 2002; Elkins 2019), and continued under his son Domitian, the two emperors mentioned in the caption, which accords with the monument’s brief history set out by Francesco Albertini in his guide to Rome (Albertini 1510, 1, chapter 10, fol. G v). This plan is followed on the next three pages by further plans of the monument representing it at different levels, all of which form a coherent group. Together with yet other drawings found elsewhere in the codex, they constitute the fullest and most accurate records of the Colosseum to survive from the Renaissance period, and, unlike earlier drawings based in large part just on visual observation, they seemingly derive from a rigorously measured survey, which provided detailed knowledge not only about the building’s shape and composition but also about how the plan is – and was originally – set out.
This first plan, labelled in capitals, focuses on the walls radiating from the arena to the eighty-bay exterior, which supported the seating of the cavea, omitting the many internal staircases (covered in other Coner drawings) to emphasise the basic geometry. It is constructed from a series of concentric ovals that are generated from four sets of concentric circles, each having a highly visible construction point at its centre. Each oval has two smaller circles determining the curves at its two tighter ends, and two larger circles generate the broader curves on its long ‘sides’. The two foci of the smaller circles lie on the building’s long axis within the arena (shifted slightly during the drawing’s execution), while those of the larger circles lie on the cross axis just outside the arena. These four foci form a notional diamond (rhombus) shape at the heart of the design, and they were also used to determine the angles of the radiating walls: the two on the long axis determine how the walls fan out at the two ends of the structure, while the two on the cross axis establish the alignment of the walls on the more gently curving ‘sides’. The only exceptions to this are the radiating cavea walls on either side of the long axis which have their own separate focal points at the opposite end of the arena’s perimeter.
The Coner drawing is a highly accurate rendition of the shape of the plan, according with modern surveys of the Colosseum in respect to the locations of the four construction points and the system used to generate the angles of the radiating walls, even if the precise geometric configuration of the four construction points (based on a diamond-shaped configuration of four abutting right-angled triangles with sides in the proportions of 3 : 4 : 5) may not have been recognised at this particular time. It follows, therefore, that the actual building was set out in this same way, and, while it has been argued that it was designed with an even greater refinement, with ovals having four additional arcs (and therefore construction points) on the diagonals to assist with the transition between the tighter and gentler curves (Wilson Jones 1993), this does not negate the drawing’s essential accuracy. Close to modern surveys, too, is the treatment of the two walls immediately either side of the long-axis entrances, which, as noted, are unlike the other walls and do not radiate from the foci of the circles that generate the tight ends of the oval. Modern surveys show these to be parallel, while the drawing shows them to be almost so, although actually converging at points close to the arena’s perimeter. Despite its small size, the plan is executed with considerable care and accuracy, with a scale used to assist its setting out, as can be seen from a horizontal line of pin pricks (spaced every 4.5mm or 7.5 braccia) that cuts across it. It is not, however, entirely without error, in that the external arches at the two more tightly-curving ends are shown as equal in size to most of the other exterior arches whereas, although now lost, they were probably slightly wider like those on the ‘sides’. This minor mistake is then corrected in the following drawing. The care that went into the plan’s execution can be seen through the drawing of the tiny half-columns on the exterior with a compass, even though these have a radius of just 0.5mm. Features smaller still, such as the internal pilaster articulation of the two outer annular corridors were omitted because they were just too small to be depicted without making an unnecessary mess, and because they would be shown in subsequent drawings. Omitted from this plan, too, are any measurements, this being probably because they are given on a blown-up detail of the plan on the verso, and perhaps because, for this first drawing of the collection, the provision of such information was overridden by aesthetic considerations.
The drawing adopts an interesting and new approach towards the recording of antiquities in general that is seen in the depiction of the central arena. Whereas for most of the cavea the curves of concentric circles are clearly delineated, those defining the edge of the arena are omitted, except for the two pairs of piers positioned on the short axis. This absence is the result not of the drawing being left incomplete but of a strategy, followed fairly consistently throughout the sketchbook, to avoid delineating parts of structures that were either destroyed or invisible, and to circumvent any misconceptions arising from arbitrary reconstruction. In this instance, the actual boundary of the arena could not be determined and so none was indicated.
As is evident from the great accuracy of the oval’s shape (which could not have been determined by simply measuring the monument’s length and width), the drawing must have depended on a carefully measured survey, and this is further implied by the compass bearings for north and south that are indicated in annotations (noted by Günther 1988, pp. 172 and 175). An indication that a careful survey of the building was undertaken at precisely the time the Codex Coner was being compiled appears in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese in a note attached to one of his earlier inaccurate drawings of the Colosseum, which states that the structure was ‘measured precisely, on this day 24 July 1513’ (misurato apunto, questo dì 24 di luglio 1513: Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 71; Günther 1988, pp. 137–38, 199 and 337), and it then goes on to specify the length and width dimensions. Providing such precise information would imply that Sangallo was involved in the enterprise, but he cannot have undertaken it alone, since the surveying of a structure of such a size and complexity would have required a considerable workforce, presumably made up of members of the Sangallo circle that perhaps included Bernardo della Volpaia himself. Such an enterprise must have been driven by a newly invigorated antiquarian zeal, especially since no proper survey of the Colosseum had yet been undertaken, and there was no shortage of skilled surveyors in Rome at this time to make it possible; but the venture may have been further prompted by the recent election of the Medici pope Leo X in March 1513, who was to become one of the principal sponsors of all’antica architecture. It is worth noting that the survey was conducted at almost exactly the same time that Sangallo was drawing up schemes for a grand Medici palace on Rome’s Piazza Navona (Smyth-Pinney 2018), one of them bearing the annotation ‘palace for pope Leo in Navona in Rome 1 July 1513’.
The extent of the survey’s achievement is well illustrated by comparing the Coner plan with previous drawings. Giuliano da Sangallo’s early plan in the Taccuino Senese, for example, is fundamentally incorrect as regards the structure’s shape: it represents it, first, not as an oval but as a mandorla (an almond shape), based on two not four circles with their foci located not far apart on the building’s cross axis; secondly, it shows the arena as being almost circular, and far broader in relation to its length than it actually is; and, thirdly, it has the radiating walls of the cavea all aligned with the point of intersection of the long and short axes. These same errors are also to be found in Sangallo’s plan in the Codex Barberini (fol. 12v), and this incorrect version of the layout seems to have been regarded as authoritative even at the start of the sixteenth century, since it was still followed in a plan in the Codex Escurialensis.
While the survey drawings of 1513 do not survive, two further drawings dependent on it were included in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini (fol. 68r), one a section, and the other a plan just in outline but of almost exactly the same shape as the Coner plan. Another schematic plan drawn with the correct geometry, and almost certainly dependent on the same survey, was executed a little after the Coner drawings of the Colosseum and is found in the Kassel Codex. Compared with the Barberini and Kassel representations, however, the Coner drawings form a group that covers the whole monument in considerable detail, and in providing such a full range of measurements, they are probably closely dependent on the original survey depictions. Subsequent sixteenth-century plans of the Colosseum are in general rather less reliable. One in the slightly later Codex Mellon shows the curvature of the oval’s tight ends correctly, but flattens out the longer sides, and so distorts the shape of the arena, while also showing the geometry of the cavea’s radiating walls incorrectly. Another plan by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger is perhaps closest to the Coner version but it locates the foci of the cavea walls on the perimeter of the arena rather than beyond it. Most later plans, however, significantly misrepresent the monument’s layout, getting both its shape and geometry wrong: Sebastiano Serlio, in Book Three of his treatise (first published 1540), constructs the Colosseum with the two inner circles at the tight ends of the arena as overlapping rather than spaced apart, thus making the ends less pointed, and a similar formula was used for a drawing in Vienna, and was later followed closely by Palladio. From these examples, it is clear that the advances made in understanding the Colosseum’s design that are recorded by the Codex Coner drawings were not widely recognised subsequently, and, later on, the plan of the monument was still misrepresented even by Antoine Desgodetz (1682, pp, 248–49). It was only in the nineteenth century that the Colosseum’s correct shape would become widely known (Cresy–Taylor 1821–22, 2, pp. 49–51 and plate 116).
The choice of the Colosseum to begin the survey of ancient buildings must have been of some significance. It may have been partly to do with the monument’s size, since it was by far the largest of ancient Rome’s free-standing structures. It may, however, have also stemmed from its celebrity since it was unequivocally the most influential of all antiquities on Rome’s fifteenth-century architecture. It had provided a compositional model for the courtyards of Palazzo Venezia (1465) and Palazzetto Venezia (1467), and the façades of San Marco (1466) and the Benediction Loggia of St Peter’s (c.1461; destroyed), as well as for the treatment of the orders and entablatures in countless other buildings (especially the Doric ground storey and the top-storey entablature). This would also be why the Colosseum was one of the first ancient buildings to be the subject of a systematic measured survey – the one on which this drawing was based – and why it was a fitting subject for a new scientific approach to the study of antiquity that the Codex Coner was aiming to promote.
The mount sheet bears the seal of Anna Maria Benzoni, the wife of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s nephew, Gabriele, who inherited the Codex Coner along with the rest of Cassiano dal Pozzo Paper Museum in 1689. She added her seal to the first page of many of the volumes in the Paper Museum, presumably after her husband’s death in 1695 (Haskell–McBurney 1986).
RELATED IMAGES: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 68r ((Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 71; Borsi 1985, p. 256); [Anon.] Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel Codex, fol. 49v (Günther 1988, p. 359 and pl. 87b).
OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fols 12v (Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 22; Borsi 1985, p. 256); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 7r (Borsi 1985, p. 258); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 7949 A (Palazzo Medici in Piazza Navona) (Smyth-Pinney 2018); [Domenico Aimo (Il Varignana), attr.] New York, Morgan Library, Codex Mellon, fol. 41r; [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1555 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 74; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, pp. 190–91); Serlio 1619, 3, fols 78v–78r; [Andrea Palladio] London, RIBA, Palladio VIII, 15r (Zorzi 1959, p. 96); [Anon. Italian B] Vienna, Albertina, inv. Egger no. 23r (Egger 1903, p. 20; Valori 1985, p. 67).
OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2v/Ashby 3; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25r and flap/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39A; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40; Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113; Fol. 66v/Ashby 114; Fol. 83v/Ashby 137.
This first plan, labelled in capitals, focuses on the walls radiating from the arena to the eighty-bay exterior, which supported the seating of the cavea, omitting the many internal staircases (covered in other Coner drawings) to emphasise the basic geometry. It is constructed from a series of concentric ovals that are generated from four sets of concentric circles, each having a highly visible construction point at its centre. Each oval has two smaller circles determining the curves at its two tighter ends, and two larger circles generate the broader curves on its long ‘sides’. The two foci of the smaller circles lie on the building’s long axis within the arena (shifted slightly during the drawing’s execution), while those of the larger circles lie on the cross axis just outside the arena. These four foci form a notional diamond (rhombus) shape at the heart of the design, and they were also used to determine the angles of the radiating walls: the two on the long axis determine how the walls fan out at the two ends of the structure, while the two on the cross axis establish the alignment of the walls on the more gently curving ‘sides’. The only exceptions to this are the radiating cavea walls on either side of the long axis which have their own separate focal points at the opposite end of the arena’s perimeter.
The Coner drawing is a highly accurate rendition of the shape of the plan, according with modern surveys of the Colosseum in respect to the locations of the four construction points and the system used to generate the angles of the radiating walls, even if the precise geometric configuration of the four construction points (based on a diamond-shaped configuration of four abutting right-angled triangles with sides in the proportions of 3 : 4 : 5) may not have been recognised at this particular time. It follows, therefore, that the actual building was set out in this same way, and, while it has been argued that it was designed with an even greater refinement, with ovals having four additional arcs (and therefore construction points) on the diagonals to assist with the transition between the tighter and gentler curves (Wilson Jones 1993), this does not negate the drawing’s essential accuracy. Close to modern surveys, too, is the treatment of the two walls immediately either side of the long-axis entrances, which, as noted, are unlike the other walls and do not radiate from the foci of the circles that generate the tight ends of the oval. Modern surveys show these to be parallel, while the drawing shows them to be almost so, although actually converging at points close to the arena’s perimeter. Despite its small size, the plan is executed with considerable care and accuracy, with a scale used to assist its setting out, as can be seen from a horizontal line of pin pricks (spaced every 4.5mm or 7.5 braccia) that cuts across it. It is not, however, entirely without error, in that the external arches at the two more tightly-curving ends are shown as equal in size to most of the other exterior arches whereas, although now lost, they were probably slightly wider like those on the ‘sides’. This minor mistake is then corrected in the following drawing. The care that went into the plan’s execution can be seen through the drawing of the tiny half-columns on the exterior with a compass, even though these have a radius of just 0.5mm. Features smaller still, such as the internal pilaster articulation of the two outer annular corridors were omitted because they were just too small to be depicted without making an unnecessary mess, and because they would be shown in subsequent drawings. Omitted from this plan, too, are any measurements, this being probably because they are given on a blown-up detail of the plan on the verso, and perhaps because, for this first drawing of the collection, the provision of such information was overridden by aesthetic considerations.
The drawing adopts an interesting and new approach towards the recording of antiquities in general that is seen in the depiction of the central arena. Whereas for most of the cavea the curves of concentric circles are clearly delineated, those defining the edge of the arena are omitted, except for the two pairs of piers positioned on the short axis. This absence is the result not of the drawing being left incomplete but of a strategy, followed fairly consistently throughout the sketchbook, to avoid delineating parts of structures that were either destroyed or invisible, and to circumvent any misconceptions arising from arbitrary reconstruction. In this instance, the actual boundary of the arena could not be determined and so none was indicated.
As is evident from the great accuracy of the oval’s shape (which could not have been determined by simply measuring the monument’s length and width), the drawing must have depended on a carefully measured survey, and this is further implied by the compass bearings for north and south that are indicated in annotations (noted by Günther 1988, pp. 172 and 175). An indication that a careful survey of the building was undertaken at precisely the time the Codex Coner was being compiled appears in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese in a note attached to one of his earlier inaccurate drawings of the Colosseum, which states that the structure was ‘measured precisely, on this day 24 July 1513’ (misurato apunto, questo dì 24 di luglio 1513: Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 71; Günther 1988, pp. 137–38, 199 and 337), and it then goes on to specify the length and width dimensions. Providing such precise information would imply that Sangallo was involved in the enterprise, but he cannot have undertaken it alone, since the surveying of a structure of such a size and complexity would have required a considerable workforce, presumably made up of members of the Sangallo circle that perhaps included Bernardo della Volpaia himself. Such an enterprise must have been driven by a newly invigorated antiquarian zeal, especially since no proper survey of the Colosseum had yet been undertaken, and there was no shortage of skilled surveyors in Rome at this time to make it possible; but the venture may have been further prompted by the recent election of the Medici pope Leo X in March 1513, who was to become one of the principal sponsors of all’antica architecture. It is worth noting that the survey was conducted at almost exactly the same time that Sangallo was drawing up schemes for a grand Medici palace on Rome’s Piazza Navona (Smyth-Pinney 2018), one of them bearing the annotation ‘palace for pope Leo in Navona in Rome 1 July 1513’.
The extent of the survey’s achievement is well illustrated by comparing the Coner plan with previous drawings. Giuliano da Sangallo’s early plan in the Taccuino Senese, for example, is fundamentally incorrect as regards the structure’s shape: it represents it, first, not as an oval but as a mandorla (an almond shape), based on two not four circles with their foci located not far apart on the building’s cross axis; secondly, it shows the arena as being almost circular, and far broader in relation to its length than it actually is; and, thirdly, it has the radiating walls of the cavea all aligned with the point of intersection of the long and short axes. These same errors are also to be found in Sangallo’s plan in the Codex Barberini (fol. 12v), and this incorrect version of the layout seems to have been regarded as authoritative even at the start of the sixteenth century, since it was still followed in a plan in the Codex Escurialensis.
While the survey drawings of 1513 do not survive, two further drawings dependent on it were included in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini (fol. 68r), one a section, and the other a plan just in outline but of almost exactly the same shape as the Coner plan. Another schematic plan drawn with the correct geometry, and almost certainly dependent on the same survey, was executed a little after the Coner drawings of the Colosseum and is found in the Kassel Codex. Compared with the Barberini and Kassel representations, however, the Coner drawings form a group that covers the whole monument in considerable detail, and in providing such a full range of measurements, they are probably closely dependent on the original survey depictions. Subsequent sixteenth-century plans of the Colosseum are in general rather less reliable. One in the slightly later Codex Mellon shows the curvature of the oval’s tight ends correctly, but flattens out the longer sides, and so distorts the shape of the arena, while also showing the geometry of the cavea’s radiating walls incorrectly. Another plan by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger is perhaps closest to the Coner version but it locates the foci of the cavea walls on the perimeter of the arena rather than beyond it. Most later plans, however, significantly misrepresent the monument’s layout, getting both its shape and geometry wrong: Sebastiano Serlio, in Book Three of his treatise (first published 1540), constructs the Colosseum with the two inner circles at the tight ends of the arena as overlapping rather than spaced apart, thus making the ends less pointed, and a similar formula was used for a drawing in Vienna, and was later followed closely by Palladio. From these examples, it is clear that the advances made in understanding the Colosseum’s design that are recorded by the Codex Coner drawings were not widely recognised subsequently, and, later on, the plan of the monument was still misrepresented even by Antoine Desgodetz (1682, pp, 248–49). It was only in the nineteenth century that the Colosseum’s correct shape would become widely known (Cresy–Taylor 1821–22, 2, pp. 49–51 and plate 116).
The choice of the Colosseum to begin the survey of ancient buildings must have been of some significance. It may have been partly to do with the monument’s size, since it was by far the largest of ancient Rome’s free-standing structures. It may, however, have also stemmed from its celebrity since it was unequivocally the most influential of all antiquities on Rome’s fifteenth-century architecture. It had provided a compositional model for the courtyards of Palazzo Venezia (1465) and Palazzetto Venezia (1467), and the façades of San Marco (1466) and the Benediction Loggia of St Peter’s (c.1461; destroyed), as well as for the treatment of the orders and entablatures in countless other buildings (especially the Doric ground storey and the top-storey entablature). This would also be why the Colosseum was one of the first ancient buildings to be the subject of a systematic measured survey – the one on which this drawing was based – and why it was a fitting subject for a new scientific approach to the study of antiquity that the Codex Coner was aiming to promote.
The mount sheet bears the seal of Anna Maria Benzoni, the wife of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s nephew, Gabriele, who inherited the Codex Coner along with the rest of Cassiano dal Pozzo Paper Museum in 1689. She added her seal to the first page of many of the volumes in the Paper Museum, presumably after her husband’s death in 1695 (Haskell–McBurney 1986).
RELATED IMAGES: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 68r ((Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 71; Borsi 1985, p. 256); [Anon.] Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel Codex, fol. 49v (Günther 1988, p. 359 and pl. 87b).
OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fols 12v (Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 22; Borsi 1985, p. 256); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 7r (Borsi 1985, p. 258); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 7949 A (Palazzo Medici in Piazza Navona) (Smyth-Pinney 2018); [Domenico Aimo (Il Varignana), attr.] New York, Morgan Library, Codex Mellon, fol. 41r; [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1555 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 74; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, pp. 190–91); Serlio 1619, 3, fols 78v–78r; [Andrea Palladio] London, RIBA, Palladio VIII, 15r (Zorzi 1959, p. 96); [Anon. Italian B] Vienna, Albertina, inv. Egger no. 23r (Egger 1903, p. 20; Valori 1985, p. 67).
OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2v/Ashby 3; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25r and flap/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39A; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40; Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113; Fol. 66v/Ashby 114; Fol. 83v/Ashby 137.
Literature
Ashby 1904, p. 13
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 43739
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 43739
Level
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.
If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk