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Reference number

SM volume 115/46

Purpose

Folio 28 verso (Ashby 46): Cortile del Belvedere, the Vatican Palace (bottom terrace)

Aspect

Orthogonal cross section

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:120

Inscribed

[Mount] 46 [x2]

Signed and dated

  • c.1513/14
    Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks; on laid paper (262x169mm), stitching holes along right edge, rounded corner at bottom left, inlaid
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x160mm)

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Watermark

See recto

Notes

This section is through the superimposed corridors that flanked the Cortile del Belvedere’s lowermost terrace, and it appears to be unfinished. Although it shows the ground-storey corridor with its vault complete, it omits the floor and vault of the one above, and leaves out the top one entirely, but it records the design of the façade fairly accurately, indicating for example that the entablature of the Ionic order, unlike the one below, is mostly set back a little in each bay but with the corona continuing uninterruptedly (seen also on Fol. 27r/Ashby 43), a design feature that reappears on the top terrace (see Fol. 27v/Ashby 44).

The section corresponds closely with the orthogonal elevation of the Cortile’s lower terrace on the sheet’s other side (Fol. 28r/Ashby 45), the storey and pilaster heights matching precisely, suggesting that the two were conceived as a pair that was separate from the elevation’s perspectival rendition (Fol. 27r/Ashby 43), which has far squatter proportions. As with most of the elevational depictions in the codex, however, the section is drawn by eye rather than to scale. It is also one of only two sections in the compendium to be completely orthogonal, the second being of the Colosseum (Fol. 26r/Ashby 41), which are different from others that are mainly orthogonal but include small perspectival details, such as those of Santa Costanza and the Pantheon (Fols 12r/Ashby 20 and 24v/Ashby 38).

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol.15r/Ashby 25; Fol. 27r/Ashby 43; Fol. 27v/Ashby 44; Fol. 28r/Ashby 45; Fol. 46v/Ashby 78; Fol. 53v/Ashby 92; Fol. 54r/Ashby 93; Fol. 68r/Ashby 116; Fol. 69r/Ashby 117; Fol. 72r/Ashby 122

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 32
Ackerman 1954, p. 196

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Codex Coner has been made possible through the generosity of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin

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.


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