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Purpose

Design for an unidentified palazzo by an unidentified Italian architect, c.1730s, acquired 1759-64 (1)

Notes

It seems that this is one of a set of drawings for a palazzo probably made either without a commission but in the hope of gaining one or for a competition set by, for example, the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome. The inscribed scales are in the 'Italian hand' found, for example, on several of the 13 record drawings bought in Rome by Dance between 1759 and 1764; the watermark of an encircled fleur-de-lis is found, for example, in three of the sheets among the Italian record drawings bought in Rome [SM 44/8/4], [SM 44/8/6] and [SM 44/8/7].

Professor Alan Tait (in conversation, 12 June 2002) suggests a date of about 1730 and Alessandro Galilei (1691-1737, see Colvin) as a possible author of the design.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 Design for an unidentified palazzo by an unidentified Italian architect, c.1730s, acquired 1759-64 (1)