Drawing 2 (left): Pedestal base of Trajan’s Column

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Drawing 2 (left): Pedestal base of Trajan’s Column

Browse

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 115/91

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 115/91b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (left): Pedestal base of Trajan’s Column

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:12

Inscribed

Sub. Colu[m]na[m]. traiana[m] (‘Beneath Trajan’s Column’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The drawing is of the lowest parts of the pedestal of Trajan’s Column, consisting of two plinths above which are a torus adorned with complex guilloche, a cyma with leaf decoration, and, at the top, another torus with rope-like surface decoration. It is also illustrated elsewhere in the codex (Fol. 42r/Ashby 69 Drawing 1 and Fol. 76r/Ashby 129 Drawing 1). The details had previously been recorded by Giuliano da Sangallo in his Codex Barberini, but in orthogonal elevation rather than in the preferred format for such drawings in the Codex Coner of a section combined with a raking view, although in this instance the view is an axonometric one extending upwards to the right. The Sangallo depiction has no measurements on it and so is unlikely to have been the source for the Coner drawing which has many, while the unusual format of the Coner depiction, which is very different from the orthogonal representation of this detail later on, suggests it was based on an independent but now-lost drawing of the same detail produced previously.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 18 (Hülsen 1910, p. 28; Borsi 1985, pp. 112–16)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 42r/Ashby 69; Fol. 53r/Ashby 91 Drawing 3; Fol. 64r/Ashby 109; Fol. 76r/Ashby 129

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 47
Census, ID 45322

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.

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).