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Baths of Caracalla, Rome, c.1759-64. Plan of reconstruction and section (2)

Notes

What may have appealed to Dance about the Baths were the symmetrical planning about axes, enfilade arrangements, compartments on a semicircular plan, as well as apsidal ends, semicircular alcoves and square recesses, the circular caldarium supported by 12 piers, and twin peristyles. Some of these elements of the reconstructed plan found their way into Dance's competition design for a public gallery that won him the Gold Medal of the Parma Academy in 1763 and completed his six years in Italy.

The outline section of the ruined building does not show the details of the clerestory lighting or the dome that would have interested Dance.

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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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Contents of Baths of Caracalla, Rome, c.1759-64. Plan of reconstruction and section (2)