To an approximate scale of 1:6

C[orona]. roto[n]da. in. domo. porcaribus. (‘Round cornice in the house of the Porcari’)

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black and stylus lines

Bernardo della Volpaia

The entablature is associated in the caption with the palace belonging to the Porcari family, a domestic complex southeast of the Pantheon on the present-day Via della Pigna. It belongs to a fifteenth-century ensemble of ancient fragments in the form of a curved portal or tabernacle that once housed an image (now lost) of Marcus Porcius Cato, the Porcari family’s supposed ancestor (Nesselrath 1993, p. 102), as is made clear in a fifteenth-century inscription in the frieze. The tabernacle in its Renaissance state is recorded in drawings by Pirro Ligorio, who noted that the portal was an assemblage of an ancient cornice and an ancient doorframe. The frame, however, dates from the Renaissance, as is suggested by the returns at the bottom of the jambs that are characteristic of Renaissance designs (Campbell 2004, I, pp. 195–06). The tabernacle was well known by the time that the Codex Coner was produced as it was copied and adapted for the tempietto of the Volto Santo in Lucca Cathedral, designed by Matteo Civitali in 1484 (Davies 2022).

The Coner drawing bears a complex relationship with the tabernacle. It shows the cornice as being identical in having, as Ashby noted (1914), a crowning cyma, now deteriorated but originally adorned with identical aquatic decoration, and a corona with flutes and a soffit with fish scales, above rows of egg-and-dart, dentils and a cyma covered with foliate decoration. This, however, is where the similarities end, as the frieze, which differs from the existing one and from the one depicted in certain other early depictions such as one in the Codex Escurialensis and a second in Kassel, is shown as decorated with an urn, while the architrave is also of a different design from the existing one, in having three fascias rather than two, and also having, as the very carefully measured section indicates, decorative panelling on its underside. It could record, therefore, another curved fragment seen at the Porcari residence.

Ashby’s suggestion (1904) that the cornice fragment came from a rotunda, or an apsed building, belonging to the nearby Baths of Agrippa seems reasonable, especially since the aquatic decoration of the cyma, which includes dolphins, tridents and shells (more clearly shown in later drawings such as those by Alberto Alberti) accords with the surviving frieze decoration of the second-century Basilica of Neptune from the same complex (Richardson 1992, p. 54). A frieze ornamented with dolphins and shells that is recorded in the Codex Escurialensis and the Kassel drawing conceivably came from the same complex.

The drawing is interesting in terms of its representational technique in that the entablature is drawn as if straight, even though it was actually curved, as caption makes clear. Showing it in this way avoids the difficulties of having to depict a curving form in the section-plus-raking view format that is standard in the compilation and makes the drawing more consistent with representations of other entablatures in the codex.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fol. 20v (Egger 1906, p. 82); [Anon.] Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel Codex, fol. A45, fol. 66r; [Pirro Ligorio] Windsor, RL 10797 (Campbell 2004, 1, pp. 195–97); [Anon.] Naples, BN, MS XII D 74, fol. 14r (Lanzarini 2020, p. 517); [Alberto Alberti] Rome, ICG, vol. 2501 A, fols 21v–22r (Forni 1991, pp. 34–35)

Ashby 1904, p. 49
Ashby 1913, pp. 205–07
Census, ID 45451

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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