Scale
1/22 in to 1ft, with bar scale
Inscribed
as above
Medium and dimensions
Pen, pencil within double ruled border on two joined pieces of laid paper (633 x 983)
Hand
Soane
Watermark
J Honig & Zoonen and beehive within cartouche
Notes
Soane's sketchbook 'Italian Sketches' 1779 (SM volume 39, 6-8r,9r) has a few details of the Colosseum, but he probably acquired most of his information from Hardwick who made the Colosseum a particular subject of study, commissioning a model and communicating a paper to the Society of Antiquaries. P.du Prey, (J.Lever, editor), Catalogue of the the Drawings Collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects, G-K, 1973, p.921 mentions 'two elevations and an ideal sectional reconstruction in John Soane's collection [that] may record the appearance of [lost] Hardwick originals copied ... in the summer of 1778'. Hardwick's drawings at the RIBA Drawings Collection are a plan 'from actual admeasurements / In 1778', and an elevation of one bay inscribed 'Elevation of part of the / Colosseum - 1778 - T.Hardwick', and 'the Model to be made 1/11 [the 11 blotted] of an Inch to a Foot' (SB57/6-7).
Literature
P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp. 125-6
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
