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Reference number

SM volume 115/97

Purpose

Folio 57 recto (Ashby 97): Architrave from the Arch of Titus

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:13

Inscribed

[Drawing] arci. titi et/ uespasianj (‘Of the arch of Titus and Vespasian’); [measurements]
[Mount] 97 [x2]
[Verso] 76 [early seventeenth-century hand]

Signed and dated

  • c.1513/14
    Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink over stylus lines; on laid paper (233x165mm), rounded corners at left, small hole at bottom left, inlaid (back to front with respect to original foliation, window on verso of mount)
[Verso] Blank
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart
[Verso of mount] Window (225x157mm)

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Watermark

[Drawing] None [Mount] Fleur-de-lys in circle surmounted with crown (variant 3; cut by bottom edge of mount)

Notes

The drawing is from the Arch of Titus (identified by the caption), showing the monument’s architrave together with the profile of the frieze, although it omits the cornice and it is presumably unfinished. Just why this should be so is unclear, since there is room for the cornice as well, which would have fitted comfortably beneath the sheet’s top edge. The positioning of the drawing at the far-left edge and the addition of the caption on the architrave rather than beside it, where there is plenty of space, suggests that other drawings on the sheet were intended.

Drawings of the whole of the entablature include a possibly related one by Antonio Labacco, dating from a short time after, which is of section-plus-view format and shows how the Coner drawing would have looked had it been completed. A plate in Book Three (1540) of Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise is of similar format but has decorative detail on the front as well as the side, and it shows the architrave incorrectly as gently sloping upwards towards the front. The Coner drawing, however, does not include the additional band positioned between the capital and the architrave’s lower fascia (see Desgodetz 1682, p. 185).

RELATED IMAGES: [Antonio Labacco] Rome, BAV, Codex Rossiano 618, fol. 27v

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: Serlio 1619, fol. 100r

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 35r/Ashby 56; Fol. 56r/Ashby 95; Fol. 81r/Ashby 134; Fol. 89r/Ashby 147

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 49
Census, ID, 45445

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.


Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).