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Reference number

SM volume 115/90a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top right): Entablature from the Temple of Minerva

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:25

Inscribed

[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

Although lacking a caption, the entablature was identified by Ashby as that of the now-vanished Temple of Minerva, which once stood at the head of the Forum of Nerva (see Fol. 52r/Ashby 89). The temple had been in a precarious state of preservation before being dismantled in 1606, so that its stone could be used to build the Acqua Paola fountain on the Janiculum (Platner–Ashby 1929, pp. 227–29). In its composition, the entablature is very like that of the forum colonnades, and other Corinthian entablatures illustrated in the codex (see Cat. Fol. 52r/Ashby 89), except that the bottom moulding of the cornice is an ovolo and not a cyma.

The Coner drawing follows the same format as many others in the codex in combining a section (at right) with a perspectival view, and, like other drawings of entablatures from Corinthian buildings, it omits the capital. Omitted too, again like numerous other codex drawings, is much of the superficial embellishment, such as the vegetal ornamentation on the various cyma mouldings. This entablature is the subject of several other early drawings, including a frontal view in the Codex Escurialensis and a sketched orthogonal elevation in the Codex Strozzi from around the same period as the Coner drawing, after which time the forum and its temple became the subject of evermore intense archaeological investigation (see Viscogliosi 2000, pp. 63–86). A very similar perspectival drawing was subsequently produced by Palladio, which was probably copied from an earlier source, perhaps one closely related to the Coner depiction.

RELATED IMAGES: [Andrea Palladio] Vicenza, Museo Civico, D 30v (Zorzi 1958, p. 74; Puppi 1989, p. 101)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fol. 50r; [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1593 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 26

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 47
Census, ID 48708

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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