Drawing 2: Unidentified Doric entablature

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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 115/72

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Reference number

SM volume 115/72b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Unidentified Doric entablature

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front

Scale

Unknown

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

This drawing is mostly executed on the carefully profiled replacement patch on the recto, the result of a probable mistake being made when the recto drawing was being produced (Fol. 43r/Ashby 71 Drawing 1). It was executed after the patch was added since the receding lines at the top run over both the patch and the original sheet. Unlike the other drawing on this page it was left unfinished, as is clear from the absence of both a concluding profile on the left edge and the use of wash.

The entablature has not been identified, but it is certainly a Doric one, not only because the drawing is positioned in a run of Doric entablatures but also because one of the guttae associated with a Doric triglyph is drawn in profile in the top fascia of the architrave. Despite the guttae, however, it may not have had triglyphs because the cornice mouldings above the frieze do not project far enough forward to allow their inclusion. There are no dimensions provided but judging from the cornice’s complexity the entablature belonged to a relatively large order. The slanted corona would suggest that it was ancient rather than modern.

The entablature’s profile was copied by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB 3Av: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 50; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 120–21)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 4
Census, ID 44996

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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