To an approximate scale of 1:90

apud. capitem. Bouis. (‘Near the Capo di Bove’); [measurements]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash

Bernardo della Volpaia

This particular obelisk, now located in Piazza Navona (LTUR 1993–2000, 3, pp. 357–58), was still to be found during the sixteenth century in its late antique setting, which was on the spina of the Circus of Maxentius adjoining the imperial villa just off the via Appia and not far from the Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella (Capo di Bove), as is specified in the drawing’s caption. Made from red granite, it had been transported to Rome from Egypt during the time of the Emperor Domitian, although it was not installed, as Ashby believed, in his stadium, the precursor of Rome’s Piazza Navona, and thus close to its position today. Instead, it was installed probably in the Iseum (Parker 2003, pp. 201–02), before being moved to Maxentius’s Via Appia villa. It is shown there in a drawing by Giovannantonio Dosio, issued as a print by Giovanni Battista De’Cavalieri in 1569, which records it as having been toppled and broken into pieces. It was finally moved again, and re-erected in Piazza Navona, in 1651 to form the centrepiece of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Seasons.

The Coner depiction of the obelisk, one of several dating from the sixteenth century, was preceded by a drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo in his Codex Barberini. Like the Coner representation, this earlier drawing shows the obelisk in a reassembled state, although as being rather too slender, and it partly indicates the hieroglyphic inscriptions covering the obelisk’s faces, which were omitted in its Coner counterpart and in many later representations. Like the subsequent drawings by Antonio and Giovanni Battista da Sangallo and Baldassare Peruzzi – but unlike the Coner image – the Barberini drawing also records its various breakages. It anticipates its Coner counterpart, however, in showing the monument as standing directly on a substructure formed of two enormous blocks without any gap between them, as the subsequent drawings do as well. The Coner measurements of these blocks, however, are not precisely the same as those given by Giovanni Battista da Sangallo and Peruzzi, suggesting that there is no direct link between them.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 70r (Hülsen 1910, p. 72; Borsi 1985, pp. 239–43); [Giovanni Battista da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 1658 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 98; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 199–200); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 478 Ar+631 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 58–59; Wurm 1984, pl. 456); [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1172 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 76; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 124–25); Serlio 1619, 3, fol. 78r; De’Cavalieri 1569 (unpaginated; see Borsi 1970, no 48)

Ashby 1904, p. 40
Census, ID 44942

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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