Drawing 1 (left): Unidentified Doric entablature (lacking cornice)

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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 115/71

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Reference number

SM volume 115/71a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (left): Unidentified Doric entablature (lacking cornice)

Aspect

Cross section, with measurements, and raking view of front

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:7

Inscribed

[measurements]

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

No other record of this unidentified and seemingly fragmentary Doric entablature has been found. The drawing is very much the secondary one on the sheet and was presumably added because the entablature – despite being much smaller in size than its neighbour – likewise lacked a cornice and had an architrave with twin fascias. The entablature is indeed very small, the architrave and frieze together being less than 35cm in height, far smaller for example than those depicted later in a drawing of the portal of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s Palazzo Baldassini (Fol. 48v/Ashby 82), which together are almost double the size (60cm tall). It could, therefore, have been intended for a window or tabernacle, possibly a modern-day one although the omission of the cornice is difficult to explain.

The drawing is on a piece of paper that was carefully cut out to replace a similar piece removed from the page, presumably to correct an earlier error. This was achieved by silhouetting the left edge of the already-executed drawing next to it, and cutting the new piece of paper to fit this profile.

The drawings on this sheet are the first in the compilation of a lengthy sequence of entablatures and cornices (see Cat. Drawing 2).

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 40
Census, ID 44995

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).