[1] Copy of a measured drawing

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane in Italy: measured drawings made or copied, 1778-80
    - Italy: Bagnaia, near Viterbo: Villa Lante (3)

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Reference number

SM 45/4/12

Purpose

[1] Copy of a measured drawing

Aspect

Ground floor plans

Scale

with bar scale

Inscribed

Bagnaria, seat of the Duke of Lanti near Viterbo and dimensions given

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and some pen, pen inscriptions (red sealing wax on bottom corners of versos) on laid paper (Italian made) (505 x 384)

Hand

Soane

Notes

This pencil drawing with some pen additions is less finished than most of the other measured drawings of Italian buildings. It has a rough bar scale that is divided into 10 parts. Roman palmi are divided by 12 parts. The dimensions correspond with the scale and include fractions: 1/4, 6/8, 1/2, 7/8 and so on. The scale happens to correspond to a scale of Veronese feet (that are divided by 10) found on Gaetano Avesani's drawing of the Palazzo Pelegrini, Verona, (see SM 44/10/1). Perhaps a coincidence, and Viterbo is nearer to Rome than to Verona but in any case, the use of what seems to be an Italian scale suggests that it is a copy.

Bagnaia lies east of Viterbo which is about 45 miles north of Rome. The Villa Lante consists of two square pavilions, the first built in the second half of the 16th century for Cardinal Gambara and the other by the subsequent owner, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto. According to du Prey, 'Except for differing heraldic devices in the metopes... the facades facing the terrace-garden are identical'. The dimensions of the two pavilions are the same though the plans differ. The overall design of both the well known Mannerist gardens and of the villa treated as twin garden buildings is attributed to Vignola.

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.265-6

Level

Drawing

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

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).