Drawing 2 (right): Entablature from the Cortile del Belvedere’s top terrace

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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 115/93

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Reference number

SM volume 115/93b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (right): Entablature from the Cortile del Belvedere’s top terrace

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:8

Inscribed

Pulcri. uidere. desupra. (‘Of the Belvedere, top level’)

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

The entablature drawn here belongs, as the caption infers, to the Corinthian order of the upper terrace of Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere, which was initially of just one storey in height (see Cat. Fol. 27v/Ashby 44). Its plainness and the lack of modillions in its cornice are both unusual for a Corinthian order, even if standard in late fifteenth-century buildings in Rome, and this makes the cornice little different from the Ionic example from the Theatre of Marcellus drawn next to it. It is also unusual, as the drawing accurately illustrates, in having projections alternating with recessions beneath a corona and other mouldings at the top that run on continuously.

The drawing was added after the one of the adjacent entablature was completed (see Cat. Drawing 1).

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 15r/Ashby 25; Fol. 27r/Ashby 43; Fol. 27v/Ashby 44; Fol. 28r/Ashby 45; Fol. 28v/Ashby 46; Fol. 46v/Ashby 78; Fol. 53v/Ashby 92; Fol. 68r/Ashby 116; Fol. 69r/Ashby 117; Fol. 72r/Ashby 122

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 47
Ackerman 1954, p. 196

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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