To an approximate scale of 1:6

[Drawing] supra.porta[m].flamineam.siue populj. (‘Above the Porta Flaminia or [del] Popolo’) [Verso] 74 [early seventeenth-century hand] [Mount] 94 [x 2]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black chalk and stylus lines; on laid paper (233x167mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid (back to front with respect to original foliation, window on verso of mount) [Verso] Blank [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart [Verso of mount] Window (224x159mm)

Bernardo della Volpaia

[Drawing] None [Mount] Fleur-de-lys in circle surmounted with crown (variant 2; cut by bottom edge of mount)

This cornice was once located ‘above’, as the caption explains, the third-century Porta Flaminia, later known as the Porta del Popolo, but it is now lost following the gate’s remodelling in 1562–65 by Nanni di Baccio Bigio. As Ashby surmised, it may have originally come from a tomb on the Via Flaminia beyond. A later drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi, is annotated with the phrase proiectura quadra (‘square projection’), which suggests that it was the frame of a square panel. It was also recorded in several other early drawings. Two were produced beforehand by Giuliano da Sangallo and represent it frontally, but the one by Peruzzi, and others by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and an unidentified draughtsman from the same period, all depict it in the section-plus-view format adopted in the Coner depiction. The anonymous depiction is particularly close to the Coner drawing in the brevity of the view and the handling of the acanthus decoration of the cyma, although the cyma itself is much less attenuated. It also gives the location as ‘above’ the gate, and is of some additional interest because the measurements, which are in braccia, are identical, indicating that the two are almost certainly related. With its elongated cyma below the corona, the cornice is of unusual design, which may explain why it was drawn on a separate page, and why the page was never completed.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, 1953 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 111)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo], Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 33r (Borsi 1985, p. 86); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 10r (Hülsen 1910, p. 18; Borsi 1985, pp. 84–87; [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 409 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 47; Wurm 1984, pl. 447); [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1195 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 75; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, p. 137)

Ashby 1904, p. 48
Census, ID 46792

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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