To an approximate scale of 1:30

[Drawing] Tempio de Coruini (‘Temple of the Corvini’); 20 [early seventeenth-century hand] [Mount] 26 [x2]

• c.1625/35
  Date range: c.1625/35

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and brown wash in two tones with some stylus lines; on laid paper (232x165mm), stitching holes along left edge, rounded corners at right, inlaid (window on verso of mount) [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

[Drawing] Anchor in circle topped with six-pointed star (variant 4; cut at left) [Mount] None

A seventeenth-century addition to the compilation, this drawing was produced by one of the two artists employed to make additions to the codex, who was labelled by Campbell as the Codex Ursinianus Copyist (Campbell 2004). Its subject was correctly recognised by Ashby as the Tomb of Caius Poplicius Bibulus at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, which dates from the first century BCE. The tomb’s identity is established by a façade inscription (CIL, 6, 1319), although this is omitted in the drawing. Ashby also realised that the name of the monument given on the drawing (‘Temple of the Corvini’) derived from that of the piazza in front of it, which was known as Macel de’Corvi (‘Slaughterhouse of the Ravens’), and disappeared when the area north of the Capitoline Hill was reorganised at the start of the twentieth century; and he referred, in particular, to an early sixteenth-century drawing of the monument, now in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, that bears the caption A lo Magielo de chorbi sepultura toschanido (‘at the Macel de’Corvi’, Tuscan-style sepulchre). The structure’s pre-twentieth-century state, when it was immured into the front of a palace, is recorded in earlier photographs (Tomassetti 2000, pp. 40–41). It is now situated in open ground to one side of the Monument to Victor Emanuel II which was begun in 1885.

The drawing corresponds fairly closely with the tomb in its present state. Rising from an unadorned podium, its three-bay façade has a portal at the centre and slightly narrower side bays with panels capped with cornices, and its simple Doric (or possibly Tuscan) pilasters carry a fragmentary entablature (partly surviving in the left-hand bay) with a frieze decorated with bucrania alternating with garlands and paterae. As in the drawing, too, the façade continues just beyond the edge of the left-hand pilaster, perhaps indicating that the tomb was originally attached to a neighbouring edifice (Campbell 2004). It differs from the surviving structure, however, in the treatment of the podium, depicting three massive courses and plinths that are extra-tall rather than the two courses (bearing the façade inscription) that are visible above ground level today, which are followed by a couple of steps beneath the pilaster plinths. Modern archaeology, however, has determined that the original podium was a good deal taller than at present, and so in that respect more like the drawing than the tomb as seen today (Tomassetti 2000). The drawing also differs from the surviving structure in regularising the relationship between the pilasters and the decoration in the frieze, in modifying the patterning of the stonework in the side bays by including invented wedge-shaped blocks beneath the panels, and in reconstructing the central portal to have a six-panelled door for which there is no evidence.

Like the other seventeenth century drawings in the album, the drawing was almost certainly based on a depiction of the tomb produced long beforehand, even though there are no especially close counterparts that survive from earlier times. In respect to the perspectival treatment of the pilasters, however, it recalls much earlier drawings such as the one now in Milan, and this antiquated convention was occasionally respected later on, as can be seen from a drawing ascribed to ‘Pseudo-Cronaca’ in the Uffizi, which also shows a very similar six-panelled door (Campbell 2004). Yet, although the Coner image still differs in many of its particulars from this and other earlier examples, it bears a striking similarity to a sketch produced by Sallustio Peruzzi, presumably itself copied from a previous representation, of the left-hand side bay. This has the stonework arranged in an identical pattern with the fictitious wedge-shaped block beneath the projecting plinth (Campbell 2004), and it also shows the façade as extending a little beyond the end pilaster, as well as providing information missing from the Coner sheet by recording the façade inscription and also supplying an accompanying plan. It can be concluded, therefore, that both the Coner sheet and the Sallustio drawing were derived – despite their differences – from the same original, and that this original was probably produced well before the mid- sixteenth century.

The script of the caption is rather different from those on the album’s other seventeenth-century drawings, although, as Campbell noted, it is seen again in a label added to one of the original sheets (Fol. 39r/Ashby 63).


OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ‘Bramantino Sketchbook’, Cod. S.P. 10/33, no. 10 (Mongeri 1875, pl. 10); [‘Pseudo-Cronaca’] Florence, GDSU, 166 Sr (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 9); [Sallustio Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 106 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 122)

Ashby 1904, p. 27
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 608–10
Census, ID 44265

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