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Reference number

SM volume 115/3b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Colosseum (one-bay segment at ground level)

Aspect

Plan

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:190

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus line, compass pricks and black chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This drawing of a wedge-shaped sector of the plan corresponds with one of the building’s eighty peripheral bays. It was considered by Ashby to have been the first of the two drawings executed on the sheet, begun as part of very detailed plan of the building and abandoned in favour of the quarter plan next to it, but it was actually an afterthought intended to fill an otherwise empty corner of the page. The side walls are not shown in full, and the one on the left is truncated so as not to interfere too much with the quarter plan, with a small overlap indicating that the main drawing took precedence. There are no measurements as these were included already on the main drawing.

An almost identical wedge was previously included in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese and another drawing of one of the wedges appears a little later in the Codex Mellon, where it is combined with a larger portion of the plan and shown angled on the page, although in this case the chosen wedge includes elements from one of the main-axis entrances rather than the standard one recorded in the Coner drawing.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 5v (Borsi 1985, p. 254); [Domenico Aimo (Il Varignana), attr.] New York, Morgan Library, Codex Mellon, fol. 40v

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2r/Ashby 2; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25r and flap/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39A; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40); Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113; Fol. 66v/Ashby 114; Fol. 83v/Ashby 137

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 13
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 43741

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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