Unknown

In uia Latina (‘On the Via Latina’)

• c.1625/35
  Date range: c.1625/35

Pen and brown ink and pink-brown wash over graphite or black chalk and compass pricks

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

The drawings on this sheet are both seventeenth-century additions to the compilation. This one is a perspective view of the interior of a tomb which, as the caption indicates, was on the Via Latina outside Rome to the southeast, and could have been the rectangular and apsed structure on the Via Latina at the sixth mile (LTUR Suburbium 2001–08, 3, p. 191).

The depicted view is poorly executed and difficult to read and it does not correspond well with the accompanying plan (Drawing 2), which is of presumably the same building. The end wall is shown as narrow (rather than broad), and as framed by a pair of Doric half-columns (which in the plan are quarter-columns positioned in the space’s corners), and the central apse has a half dome adorned with a scallop shell and a rectangular panel half-way up the wall (but not the central recess shown in the plan). The side walls are shown as curved (as opposed to flat in the plan) and they accommodate curving and pedimented rectangular recesses. The ceiling above is designed with what could be a pavilion vault that is decorated in the web above the apse. These anomalies, as Campbell realised, are probably the result of misrepresentation through a process of successive copying.

A pair of mid- sixteenth-century sketch drawings of the same tomb from the circle of Bartolomeo Ammannati in Padua showing both interior and plan (these closely matched by a pair in Saint Petersburg) reveal a similar set of contradictions. The view is likewise conceived as a cut-away perspective depiction, and it similarly shows the rear wall as narrower than in the plan. It differs from the Coner drawing, however, in showing the side walls as flat, and so is more consistent with the side walls in the plan, and it also represents a floor-level arcosolium (entombment recess) at the base of the apse. These differences suggest that the Coner drawing was not directly dependent on the one in Padua but that both drawings were derived ultimately from the same prototype.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Circle of Bartolomeo Ammannati] Padua, BUP, Ms. 764, fol 14v (Olivato 1978); [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 5v (Lanzarini–Martinis 2015, p. 91).

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 16v/Ashby 27 (Drawing 2 on this page)

Ashby 1904, p. 27
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 611–12
Census, ID 46784

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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