Drawing 2 (top left): Column shaft from the Basilica of Maxentius

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Drawing 2 (top left): Column shaft from the Basilica of Maxentius

Browse

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 115/59

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 115/59b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top left): Column shaft from the Basilica of Maxentius

Aspect

Cross section through shaft

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:55

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over stylus lines and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The drawing is a horizontal section through the shaft of one of the enormous columns from the Basilica of Maxentius. It could be of one of the two still standing at the start of the sixteenth century, seen in a drawing sometimes attributed to Bramante, perhaps the one (between the left-hand and central arches) that remained in place until 1613, when it was removed and re-erected in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore; but it may have been derived instead from a fragment of one of the other six columns that was already fallen. The shaft, fluted but monolithic and made of marble, is of around a colossal 15m, or fifty Roman feet, in height (with a total column height approaching 19m or sixty-five Roman feet; see Minoprio 1932, p. 9), while the flutes are a standard twenty-four in number. The column was of interest to other early draftsmen, including Baldassare Peruzzi around 1519 and Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo at around the same time, who both made comparable sketches of the section.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Bramante, attr.] Florence, GDSU, 1711 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 11–12); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 396 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 41–42; Wurm 1984, pl. 8); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 487 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 45; Wurm 1984, pl. 78); [Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 1652 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 100; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 196–97)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 9v/Ashby 16; Fol. 37r/Ashby 59 (Drawing 1 on the page)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 36
Census, ID 45043

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).