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Folio 31 verso (Ashby 50): Crane
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Reference number
SM volume 115/50
Purpose
Folio 31 verso (Ashby 50): Crane
Aspect
View
Scale
Not known
Inscribed
[Drawing] 45 [early seventeenth-century hand]
[Mount] 50 [x2]
Signed and dated
- c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14
Medium and dimensions
[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and wash; on laid paper (232x167mm), slight damage at bottom left edge, rounded corners at right, inlaid (back-to-front with respect to original foliation)
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x160mm)
Hand
Bernardo della Volpaia
Watermark
See recto
Notes
The hoist or crane shown here is for lifting stone, and it has a piece of an entablature suspended from it. It is a relatively simple machine, made of wood and consisting of an 'A’ frame tilted at an angle and supported by two legs, each shaped like a ‘V’ and carefully notched into it. From the top hangs a rope and pulley that are connected to a winding mechanism near the base, which consists of a drum set between a pair of wheels with outer projections, rather like the handles of a later ship’s wheel, that was used to control the process of raising and lowering.
Representations of machines are common in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books of drawings but none is known to us that is exactly comparable to this one. More elaborate machines for lifting columns are depicted, for example, in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini (e.g. fol. 71r). The presence of such a drawing in this compilation is difficult to explain as it is the only one there of a machine. Equally puzzling is its position in the codex, in a section otherwise devoted to the elevations of buildings. Its placement on the sheet in the bottom left-hand quarter suggests that other drawings, perhaps also of machines, were intended.
OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 71r (Hülsen 1910, pp. 73–74; Borsi 1985, pp. 317–33)
Representations of machines are common in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books of drawings but none is known to us that is exactly comparable to this one. More elaborate machines for lifting columns are depicted, for example, in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini (e.g. fol. 71r). The presence of such a drawing in this compilation is difficult to explain as it is the only one there of a machine. Equally puzzling is its position in the codex, in a section otherwise devoted to the elevations of buildings. Its placement on the sheet in the bottom left-hand quarter suggests that other drawings, perhaps also of machines, were intended.
OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 71r (Hülsen 1910, pp. 73–74; Borsi 1985, pp. 317–33)
Literature
Ashby 1904, p. 34
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