Not known

[Drawing] 9 [in graphite]
[Mount] 99 [x2]

• 1625/35
  Date range: 1625/35

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and pink-brown wash over graphite; on laid paper (232x165mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (223x158mm)

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

See recto

The fragment shown here has not been identified with any great certainty. Ashby considered it to be an invention and likened it to a plate in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola’s Regola of an entablature with a comparable frieze (Vignola 1562, fol. 26). Vignola had described the entablature as being based on various different examples, specifying the Pantheon and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, but without mentioning a specific source for the frieze, which features a candelabrum and a kneeling Victory. Campbell, however, has recently drawn attention to the much-restored portion of a frieze, now in Munich’s Glyptothek, that once belonged to the lower internal storey of the Basilica Ulpia in Trajan’s Forum, and he tentatively linked it with the Coner drawing. This frieze, which depicts Victories, candelabra and also sacrificial bulls, was certainly known in the Renaissance, since a part of it showing a Victory sacrificing a bull was recorded in a sketch attributed to Maarten van Heemskerck from the 1530s, when, as an annotation indicates, it was in the Della Valle collection, from where it eventually passed to King Ludwig of Bavaria in Munich (see Bober–Rubinstein 1986, p. 202). The surviving fragment also matches closely, albeit in mirror orientation, with the part of the frieze showing a kneeling Victory and a candelabrum depicted in the Vignola plate, which, so Campbell concluded, was based on it, but it is most unlikely to have served as the prototype for the Coner drawing. The kneeling Victory featured in the fragment, and in the Vignola plate, has both her wings rather than just one made visible, has her arms in different positions, and kneels at a candelabrum of different design. The frieze in the Coner drawing, however, was clearly not the invention of its seventeenth-century draughtsman as Ashby had surmised. A drawing in Berlin dating from the mid- sixteenth century depicts an entablature that is identical in every respect, such as in having a cornice with the same wave decoration, and this seems likely to have been based on a lost original of even earlier date. Its caption in albano (noted by Campbell) perhaps indicates that the entablature was to be found in or near that town, but the trouble is that further drawings in Saint Petersburg and Naples of an identical cornice alone label it as being in Capua.

In format, the Coner drawing is like several others in the codex from this later period, being particularly similar to those of two entablatures depicted later on (Fols 60r/Ashby 101 and 61r/Ashby 103). Although almost an orthogonal elevation of the entablature’s corner, the dentils are represented so that their bottom sides are visible (even though the projecting corona is represented frontally). This hybrid format is seen frequently in drawings from the early part of the sixteenth century or before, which include occasional examples in the Codex Coner (e.g. Fol. 48r/Ashby 81), and this may well indicate that the original on which this later drawing was based dates from around the same period. As for the entablature itself, it is of the kind with no modillions like the ones illustrated in the early sixteenth-century drawings on the album’s preceding pages. In lacking modillions and having just dentils below the corona it could possibly be the entablature of an Ionic building. The number ‘9’ written in graphite in the drawing’s top-left corner refers to the production of the additional drawings for the codex.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, Inv. OZ 114, fol. 9

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Maarten van Heemskerck] Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 79 D 2 (Heemskerck Album I), fol. 44r (Hülsen–Egger 1913–16, 1, pp. 23–24); [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 87v (Lanzarini–Martinis 2015, p. 142); [Anon.] Naples, BN, MS XII D 74, fol. 10r (Lanzarini 2020, p. 504); Vignola 1562, fol. 26

Ashby 1904, p. 49
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 621–22
Census, ID 47188

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