Drawing 2: So-called Temple of Portunus at Porto, interior bay

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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 115/37

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Reference number

SM volume 115/37b

Purpose

Drawing 2: So-called Temple of Portunus at Porto, interior bay

Aspect

Perspectival elevation

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:200

Signed and dated

c.1513–14
Datable to c.1513–14

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This drawing (unidentified by Ashby) shows a partial and flattened-out version of the interior elevation (one entire bay and parts of two others) of the so-called Temple of Portunus at Porto, which is also recorded in earlier drawings (Fol. 7v/Ashby 12). It is similar in certain respects to Giuliano da Sangallo’s representation of the temple in his Codex Barberini, which depicts the exterior of the structure but also includes three interior bays in a cut-away portion of it. The Sangallo drawing, like this one, shows free-standing columns supporting an entablature that breaks forward above them, which then carries massive ribs above that rise to the apex of the dome, each pair with a tear-shaped panel between them (see Cat. Fol. 7v/Ashby 12 Drawing 2). The Coner drawing, however, differs in omitting the imposts, archivolts and keystones for which there was no evidence, thereby avoiding the introduction of inaccurate information. It also differs in showing one of the semi-circular bays that lie on the diagonal axes rather than a rectangular one aligned with the portal.

Positioning the drawing so far after the others devoted to this building, and placing on a page showing the exterior of the Pantheon is hard to explain. With no room for it on the earlier sheet, it must be that an alternative home needed to be found, but why it was inserted here rather than on one of the earlier blank pages still remains puzzling.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 37r (Hülsen 1910, 1, p. 54; Borsi 1985, pp. 194–96)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 7v/Ashby 12

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 30
Census, ID 44986

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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