Temple of Vespasian, Rome, c.1759-64

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Italy 1759-1764 (15)
  - Temple of Vespasian, Rome, c.1759-64. Measured drawings (2)

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Reference number

SM D3/1/21

Purpose

Temple of Vespasian, Rome, c.1759-64

Aspect

[2] Measured drawing of the entablature and its details

Scale

A Scale of English Feet with which the present drawing measured / A Scale of Roman Palms / A Scale of Spanish Feet (1 5/8 in to 1 ft approximately)

Inscribed

The Entablature of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans [sic], dimensions given and (on frieze) ESTITVER (for 'Restituerunt')

Signed and dated

1759-64

Medium and dimensions

Black and brown pen on coarse laid paper (630 x 935)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

(footed) P

Notes

The drawing was made with a very fine pen and watered black ink and the details done with great care though many of the dimensions were added rather casually with a coarse pen and brown ink. The drawing paper (a stout laid paper indistinctly watermarked with a footed P with a diagonal slash in the angle) is found among several other of Dance's drawings made in Italy and subsequently, and may be of Italian manufacture (see Temple of Hercules, Baths of Caracalla, Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Competition design for a public gallery awarded the gold Medal of the Parma Academy and also Newgate Gaol and St Martin Outwich).

James Mosley (The Nymph and the grot: the revival of the sanserif letter, 1999 p.22) writes of the inscribed ESTITIVER as 'the earliest surviving example of a measured drawing of an inscription'.

Level

Drawing

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).