To an approximate scale of 1:110

[Drawing] estra. Roma[m]. apud. S/ sebastianu[m]. (‘Outside Rome near San Sebastiano’); totu[m]. est. b. 481/1 (‘The whole is 48½ braccia’); crassitudo. est. b. 181/1 (‘The width is 18½ braccia’); uacuu[m]. est. b. 11⅓ (‘The void is 11⅓ braccia’) [Mount] 57 [x2]; Monument of Cecilia Metella at Rome [in pencil]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black chalk; on laid paper (230x163mm), one rounded corner at bottom left, inlaid [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (223x157mm)

Bernardo della Volpaia

See recto

The Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella, located on the Via Appia Antica around two-and-a-half kilometres south of Rome’s city walls, dates from the late first century BCE (LTUR: Suburbium, 2, pp. 9–14; Gerding 2002, pp. 71–72). It consists of a vast square podium, originally faced with travertine, on which stands an enormous rotunda sheathed in channelled ashlar and capped by a frieze of bucrania supporting a continuous garland. Above this was an upper level, of which only a few courses now survive, and on top of its remains is a fortified circumferential wall made of brick, added in the later Middle Ages by the Caetani family who used the tomb as a defensive tower attached to their partly still-extant palace. Facing the road, and therefore west, was a framed dedication tablet, with the frieze above it extended downwards to include extra sculpture, as illustrated in a print published by Antonio Lafreri in 1549. Facing south, and so not towards the roadside, was the entrance portal in the podium that leads to a chamber at the structure’s heart.

In the drawing, the mausoleum is unidentified, but its location is given as being near San Sebastiano, or in other words the church of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura on the Via Appia. It is shown in a manner that Ashby did not condone and described as ‘taking liberties’, which was to show the rotunda’s inscription tablet on the west face and the podium’s portal on the south face together in a single image as if they belonged to the same elevation. Uniting different parts of a building to form a single hybrid image, however, conforms to a strategy of maximising the information conveyed, which is also seen in other Coner depictions such as the elevational drawings of the so-called Palace of Nerva and the Palazzo della Cancelleria (Fol. 32r/Ashby 51), and the sections of the Temple of Portunus at Porto (Fol. 7v/Ashby 12) and the Pantheon (Fol. 23v/Ashby 36). In other respects, the drawing follows the normal practice in the codex of avoiding reconstruction where supporting evidence was unavailable. Thus, the drum is shown up to the level of the tops of the remaining travertine blocks above the frieze, with no attempt to reconstitute the superstructure, as Baldassare Peruzzi and his son Sallustio did later on, and with the omission of the medieval accretions and crenellations that appear in other Renaissance drawings, such as one by Giovannantonio Dosio, as well as in the engraving published by Lafreri. The drawing, moreover, is among the more accurate Renaissance renditions of the monument as regards the representation of the drum’s ashlar coursework, and correct, too, is the profile of the cyma moulding at the drum’s base and the garland-carrying bucrania in the frieze. However, there are certain errors. The enlargement of the frieze above the inscription tablet is not shown, and the ashlar facing of the podium is reconstituted, even though it had mostly vanished by the early sixteenth century, and, in this respect, it follows the precedent of a drawing in the Codex Escurialensis, although much less crudely. The reconstruction of the stonework around the arched portal is particularly intriguing because, if this stonework still existed, it would have been inside the courtyard of the attached house of the Caetani. The arch certainly accords with the surviving barrel-vaulted entrance corridor, but the portal rarely features in other Renaissance drawings, Sallustio Peruzzi incorrectly depicting it as rectangular (perhaps to match a rectangular opening halfway down the entrance corridor). The projecting stone-block surround in the Coner drawing makes it look remarkably like the one that Bramante designed for the entrance into the Cortile del Belvedere.

The horizontal dimensions given on the drawing relate to both interior and exterior. The total external width indicated on the projecting course at the top of the podium is specified as 48½ braccia, while the measurement underneath relates to the thickness of the wall and, most probably, the width of the relatively constricted internal space which rises in the form of a cone. This conical interior was originally superimposed on the elevation, as can be seen in pentimenti, but was ultimately erased, the only remnants being the vertical lines either side of the portal that converge very slightly as they rise. That they represent part of the structure’s conical interior is corroborated by given measurement of 11⅓ braccia which is far too wide for the portal as this is only about 2m (3½ braccia) in width. The erasure of this conical feature, only recorded in elevation in one other Renaissance drawing (in Saint Petersburg), was presumably prompted by the realisation that it interfered too much with the elevation as a whole, making it less attractive and more difficult to read. It has been suggested (Nesselrath 2014, pp. 49 and 52-3) that the curved stylus lines above the monument indicate that another storey was going to be added to the structure, but a more likely explanation, which that fits with the Coner practice of avoiding reconstruction, is that the drawing was originally positioned too far up the page and this was changed only after the stylus preparation (clearly visible in raking light) had been partly begun.

An idiosyncrasy of the drawing in comparison with other representations of the mausoleum is the stretching of the building horizontally, which makes it look much squatter than it is in reality. This feature is seen in several other Coner drawings of ancient monuments, particularly triumphal arches (see e.g. Fols 33r/Ashby 53 and 34r/Ashby 54), and like them the viewpoint is imagined as being high above ground level. The actual ground level is not indicated, presumably because it could not be established. A related representational technique adopted here, seen particularly at the rotunda’s bottom left, is to show the profile of the mouldings and a glimpse of their rear continuation from above, which finds close parallels in the representations in the codex of bases (see e.g. Fol. 73r/Ashby 124 and Fol. 73v/Ashby 125). This similarly led to an inconsistency with the receding line of the edge of the podium beneath which, like in these drawings of bases, had to be adjusted at a late stage.

The building’s commemorative dedication was not included in the depicted inscription plaque and was not otherwise recorded, even though it is given in Francesco Albertini’s guide to Rome (Albertini 1510, 1, chapter 17, fol. Iiiii v). Because of this, and because the building is not properly identified, it is named in a caption added to the mount in the nineteenth century.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fol. 33r (Egger 1905–06, pp. 98–99); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 488 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 52; Wurm 1984, pl. 408); [Sallustio Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 665 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 120); [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 10r (Lanzarini-Martinis 2014, p. 94); [Circle of Antonio Lafreri] Speculum romanae magnificentiae (Hülsen 1921, p. 150); [Giovannantonio Dosio] Florence, BNC, N.A. 618 (Dosio Sketchbook), fol. 32r (Tedeschi Grisanti 1983, p. 92)

Ashby 1904, p. 36
Census, ID 44556

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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