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  • image SM volume 115/91c
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Reference number

SM volume 115/91c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (bottom right): Pedestal cornice of Trajan’s Column

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:9

Inscribed

.Sub. colu[m]na. Troiana[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

This drawing, which complements the one to its left, records the cornice at the top of the pedestal of Trajan’s Column, as the annotation makes clear – albeit in its corrupted Latin. It may depend on the same recording campaign as all the other drawings of the monument in the codex which are particularly numerous. In combining a section with an oblique view of the richly ornamented cornice, it differs from the orthogonal representation of the same detail in Giuliano da Sangallo’s earlier Codex Barberini, and it was presumably based on a different prototype. The same moulding is also depicted on a subsequent sheet (see Cat. Fol. 64r/Ashby 109). A simplified copy of the drawing was made by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB 3Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 50; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 118–19)

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 2; Fol. 64r/Ashby 109; Fol. 76r/Ashby 129

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 47
Census, ID 45334

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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