Not known

[Drawing] Questo tempietto è in via latina,/ et e opera di mattoni (‘This little temple is on the Via Latina and is made of brick’); 22 [early seventeenth-century hand]; [in graphite] 6 [Mount] 30 [x2]

• c.1625/35
  Date range: c.1625/35

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over graphite or black chalk and compass pricks; on laid paper (232x163mm), rounded corner at top right, inlaid [Verso] Blank [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x156mm)

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursianus Copyist)

[Drawing] Anchor in circle topped with six-pointed star (variant 4; cut at left) [Mount] Fleur-de-lys in circle surmounted with crown (variant 2; cut by bottom edge of window)

A seventeenth-century insertion into the compilation, this perspectival drawing, faintly numbered ‘6’ in the bottom-right corner, records the interior elevation of a mausoleum on the Via Latina which, as the annotation specifies, was built of brick. At ground level, it had a large segmental arch, perhaps best read as an arcosolium (tomb recess) set into an otherwise undecorated wall, beneath a projecting band running around the periphery. The wall above this level is richly embellished and divided by half-columns into three bays to accommodate a shallow, scallop-headed niche at the centre and a pair of framed rectangular recesses to either side. At the top, under the vault, is a lunette-shaped area divided into three, the central portion apparently occupied by a window opening.

The drawing must represent the long wall facing the entrance of the plan depicted on the previous page (Fol. 17v/Ashby 29), even though there are proportional inconsistences, such as the central bay here being much wider than the flanking ones rather than narrower as in the plan. It has a close counterpart, like the plan, in a mid- sixteenth-century compilation in Berlin, which carries a similar annotation referring to the brickwork construction but adds that the building was ruined on two sides and that the brick was covered in stucco. The Coner depiction differs from this earlier drawing, however, in making the head of the niche pointed rather than semi-circular, which Campbell explained was a result of one half of it being executed before the other.

A drawing of a tomb illustrated in an album now in Saint Petersburg is perhaps of the same structure, although the height of the main storey is reduced and the width of the side bays is increased. It is paired, moreover, with a plan that is square rather than rectangular, but this difference could be explained as an alternative reconstruction of fragmentary remains (see Fol. 17v/Ashby 29). A tomb of very similar plan, said to be two miles outside the Porta Latina, was later recorded by a Portuguese draftsman who also illustrated the three-bay interior, and this had ruined arcosolia on all four sides, with three-bay compositions of half-columns, niches and recesses above them. A drawing by Pirro Ligorio showing an arcosolium surmounted by three bays of half-columns framing a niche and side recesses probably shows this same building.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, inv. OZ 114, fol. 27

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 4r (Lanzanrini–Martinis 2015, pp. 89-90); [Anon. Portuguese draughtsman] Windsor, RL, 10364v (Campbell 2004, 1, pp. 328–29); [Pirro Ligorio] Oxford, Bod. Lib., Ms. Canon. ital. 138, fol. 115v (Campbell 2004, 1, p. 328 comp. fig. 4; Campbell 2016, p. 172)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 17v/Ashby 29

Ashby 1904, p. 28
Ashby 1913, p. 200
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 617–18
Census, ID 46791

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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