Drawing 4 (lower right): Nymphaeum from the Cortile del Belvedere’s middle terrace

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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 115/25d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (lower right): Nymphaeum from the Cortile del Belvedere’s middle terrace

Aspect

Plan, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:180

Inscribed

[letter key] .C.; [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

The nymphaeum originally fronting the Cortile’s upper terrace was executed and is still partly preserved beneath the early nineteenth-century Braccio Nuovo which now separates the upper terrace from the level in front and below it (Frommel 1998). It is the earliest known re-creation in the Renaissance of an ancient nymphaeum, and it must have been inspired in part by the nymphaeum of the Temple of Fortuna at Palestrina, which, like the Cortile’s nymphaeum, is positioned between ramped ascents, although the Palestrina ramps are not doubled as they are here. The Cortile’s nymphaeum had an apsed interior with pilasters and niches, and it was entered, as later images such as the topographical view of the Cortile by Giovanni Battista Naldini confirm, from a three-bay façade with a central arch, pilasters and side niches. This three-bay format was then repeated around the upper terrace’s perimeter.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giovanni Battista Naldini, formerly attributed to Giovannantonio Dosio] Florence, GDSU, 2559 A (Ackerman 1954, pp. 216–17)

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

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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