Folio 31 verso (Ashby 50): Crane

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Folio 31 verso (Ashby 50): Crane

Browse

Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

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)

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

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).