Drawing 2 (top right): Spiral staircase near the Cortile del Belvedere

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Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)
  - SM volume 115/25

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Reference number

SM volume 115/25b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Spiral staircase near the Cortile del Belvedere

Aspect

Plan, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:170

Inscribed

[letter key] .A.; [measurements]

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown and brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This plan detail is of Bramante’s celebrated spiral staircase, which was begun by 1512 although perhaps proposed around 1507 (Denker Nesselrath 1996, pp. 13–16). It corrects the inaccurate axial positioning of the internal columns shown on the master plan (Drawing 1), but it does not fully convey the design’s remarkable ingenuity. The columns number eight per circuit but they are stacked up in over four full storeys, with a different order for each (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic and then Composite), and with shafts of accordingly diminishing diameter, as is recorded in a section in Rome produced in the 1520s (see Denker Nesselrath 1996, p. 26). The staircase has rectangular apertures on the main axes and semi-circular niches on the diagonals perhaps intended for statuary. Although usually described as a ‘staircase’ – and shown as such in the Coner drawing – the ascent is actually in the form of a ramp for access by horse or mule.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Rome, ICG, Vol. 2510, fol. 79v (Günther 1988, p. 352 and pl. 77a)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: see Drawing 1

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 23–26
Ashby 1913, pp. 197–200
Ackerman 1954, pp. 193–95
Denker Nesselrath 1996, p. 25

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

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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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