Drawing 2 (left): Architrave and frieze once in San Marco

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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 115/98

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Reference number

SM volume 115/98b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (left): Architrave and frieze once in San Marco

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:8

Inscribed

.in. S. marco. (‘In San Marco’)

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The frieze of this otherwise unrecorded fragment is decorated with acanthus coils while, unusually, all three of the architrave’s fascias are also ornamented, the topmost with bucrania, swags and bell-like forms. That the cornice was missing rather than simply left undrawn is indicated by the neat positioning of the caption just above the frieze’s angled upper edge. The drawing must have been added to the sheet after its companion had been executed, as is suggested by their close proximity, as well as by its closeness to the sheet’s edge, and the wrapping of the section around the architrave of the neighbouring drawing.

Although the fragment is recorded in the caption as being in San Marco, no trace of it can be found there now, and it was probably lost when the church underwent its major seventeenth-century refurbishment.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 49
Census, ID 45449

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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