Drawing 2 (top right): Impost from the Arch of Septimius Severus

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Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)
  - SM volume 115/95

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Reference number

SM volume 115/95b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Impost from the Arch of Septimius Severus

Aspect

Orthogonal view of a corner

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:11

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over black chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The drawing records the impost of the transverse internal archway of the Arch of Septimius Severus, and it does so with great precision (cf. Desgodetz 1682, p. 115). At the bottom, it shows the top of the supporting wall with its flare, fillet and roll-moulding and, above these unadorned elements, comes a frieze decorated with acanthus swirls with a bearded protome at the corner, which, in turn, is capped with a cyma embellished with acanthus fronds and buds, and a cavetto at the top with further acanthus ornamentation. It is far more detailed and accurate that the earlier depiction of the same moulding in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini, and in some respects more accurate than the later measured drawings of it in Berlin and Vienna, which omit the corner protome. Another of the arch’s imposts, from the side archways of the façade, is recorded in a later drawing (Fol. 64v/Ashby 110).

The drawing differs markedly in its handling from many others in the album, in particular in being executed over detailed black chalk preparatory work, and in its emphasis on recording sculpted detail. This difference in treatment, together with the more haphazard-than-usual distribution of the drawings across the sheet, suggests that the drawing was made during the second phase of the compilation’s execution.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 22r (Hülsen 1910, p. 31; Borsi 1985, pp. 129– 32); [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 4151, fol. 56v; [Anon. French draughtsman] Vienna, Albertina, inv. Egger no. 43v (Egger 1903, p. 23)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 34r/Ashby 54; Fol. 64v/Ashby 110; Fol. 89r/Ashby 147

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 48
Census, ID 45637

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

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.

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